The invention of the passport : surveillance, citizenship, and the state

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT
Surveillance, Citizenship and the State

In order to distinguish between those who may and may
not enter or leave, states everywhere have developed
extensive systems of identification, central to which is
the passport. This innovative book argues that docu-
ments such as passports, internal passports and related
mechanisms have been crucial in making distinctions
between citizens and non-citizens. It examines how the
concept of citizenship has been used to delineate rights
and penalties regarding property, liberty, taxes and wel-
fare. It focuses on the US and Western Europe, moving
from revolutionary France to the Napoleonic era, the
American Civil War, the British industrial revolution,
pre-World War I Italy, the reign of Germany's Third
Reich and beyond. This original study combines
theory and empirical data in questioning how and why
states have established the exclusive right to authorize
and regulate the movement of people.

John Torpey is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and
Chair of the International Studies Faculty Board at the
University of California, Irvine. Previously he was pro-
gram officer in the Jennings Randolph Program for
International Peace at the United States Institute of
Peace. He has held fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the German Marshall
Fund, the European University Institute (Florence,
Italy), and the Center for European Studies at Harvard.
His other publications include Intellectuals, Socialism and
Dissent: The East German Opposition and its Legacy (1995)
and Documenting Individual Identity (co-edited with Jane
Caplan 2000), as well as numerous articles in such
journals as Geneses, Theory and Society, and German
Politics and Society.

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The vagabond is by definition a suspect.
Daniel Nordman

THE INVENTION OF
THE PASSPORT

Surveillance, Citizenship and the State
John Torpey

University of California, Irvine

■H CAMBRIDGE

WW UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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©John Torpey 2000

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First published 2000

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication data
Torpey, John C.

The invention of the passport: surveillance, citizenship and the state.

Bibliography.

Includes index.

ISBN 0 521 63249 8 (hbk).

ISBN 0 521 63493 8 (pbk).

1. Passports - Europe - History - 19th century. 2. Passports - History.
3. Passports - France - History - 18th century. 4. Citizenship -
History. I. Title. (Series: Cambridge studies in law and society).
323.67

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Torpey, John C.

The invention of the passport: surveillance, citizenship, and the state
John Torpey.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-521-63249-8 (hardback: alk. paper). — ISBN 0-521-63493-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Passports — United States. 2. Freedom of movement —
United States. 3. Passports — Europe, Western. 4. Freedom of
movement — Europe.Western. I. Title.

K3273.T67 1999 99-33083
342'.082— dc21

ISBN 0 521 63249 8 hardback
ISBN 0 521 63493 8 paperback

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the

Legitimate "Means of Movement" 4

Monopolizing the legitimate means of movement 6

Modern states: "penetrating" or "embracing"? 10

Getting a grip: institutionalizing the nation-state 14

The prevalence of passport controls in absolutist Europe 18

2 "Argus of the Patrie": The Passport Question in the French

Revolution 21

The passport problem at the end of the Old Regime 21
The flight of the King and the revolutionary renewal of passport

controls 25
The Constitution of 1 791 and the elimination of passport controls 29

The debate over passport controls of early 1792 32

A detailed examination of the new passport law 36

Passports and freedom of movement under the Convention 44

Passport concerns of the Directory 51

3 Sweeping Out Augeas's Stable: The Nineteenth-Century

Trend Toward Freedom of Movement 57
From the emancipation of the peasantry to the end of the

Napoleonic era 58
Prussian backwardness? A comparative look at the situation in

the United Kingdom 66
Freedom of movement and citizenship in early nineteenth-century

Germany 71

Toward the relaxation of passport controls in the German lands 75
The decriminalization of travel in the North German

Confederation 81

Broader significance of the 1867 law 88

vii

CONTENTS

4 Toward the "Crustacean Type of Nation": The Proliferation of

Identification Documents From the Late Nineteenth

Century to the First World War 93

Passport controls and state development in the United States 93

Paper walls: Passports and Chinese exclusion 96
The "nationalization" of immigration restriction in the

United States 101

Sovereignty and dependence: The Italian passport law of 1901 103

The spread of identification documents for foreigners in France 105
The resurrection of passport controls in late nineteenth-century

Germany 108
The First World War and the "temporary" reimposition of

passport controls 111

"Temporary" passport controls become permanent 116

The United States and the end of the laissez faire era in migration 117

5 From National to Postnational? Passports and Constraints on

Movement from the Interwar to the Postwar Era 122
The emergence of the international refugee regime in the

early interwar period 124

Passports, identity papers, and the Nazi persecution of the Jews 131
Loosening up: Passport controls and regional integration in

postwar Europe 143

Conclusion: A Typology of "Papers" 158

International passports 159

Internal passports 1 64

Identity cards 165

Notes 168

References 191

Index 203

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While I was confident from the outset that a book about "the history of
the passport" was a clever idea, I was less convinced at first that this was a
subject of any real significance. I therefore owe a great debt to several
historians who helped persuade me very early on that this would indeed
prove a worthwhile undertaking: Paul Avrich, Eric Hobsbawm, Stephen
Kern, Eugen Weber, and Robert Wohl. While I had the good fortune
to enjoy an extended colloquy with Robert Wohl in the context of a
National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored seminar on intel-
lectuals and politics during the summer of 1994 when the idea for this
study was first formulated, the others simply responded to an unsolicited
query from a young scholar unknown to them. This generosity only
increased the admiration I had for them, which was of course what had
led me to write to them in the first place. Todd Gitlin also reacted with
enthusiasm to the idea of the book. Todd's endorsement of the project
as well as his steadfast support for me and my work have been a source of
great satisfaction over the last decade and more; I feel honored to have
his friendship and encouragement. Without the generosity of these peo-
ple, this project would never have become more than an idle curiosity.

Once I had seriously embarked on the project, two other people,
Gerard Noiriel and Jane Caplan, lent their enthusiasm and provided
shining examples of the kind of scholarship I wanted to produce.
Noiriel's writings on the history of immigration, citizenship, and identi-
fication documents in France have been a major inspiration for me; the
citations of his work in the text point only to the visible peak of an ice-
berg of scholarly debt. Jane Caplan 's support for this project quickly led
to a collaborative undertaking on related issues concerning the prac-
tices that states have developed to identify individuals in the modern
period, to be published elsewhere. Working with her has been both a
real pleasure and an extended private tutorial (entirely unrecom-
pensed) in scholarly professionalism. I feel profoundly fortunate and
grateful that David Abraham put us in touch, somehow intuiting - as a
result of my work on passports and Jane's on tattooing - that "you're
working on the same kind of stuff."

IX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Next, I am particularly indebted to Aristide Zolberg, whose work on
the dynamics of international migration in the modern world has deeply
influenced my own thinking about these matters. Although we had met
on a couple of occasions earlier and I was familiar with a number of his
writings on this subject, it was as a result of my participation in the
German American Academic Council-SSRC Summer Institute on
Immigration, Integration, and Citizenship, organized by Ari and the
impressive Austrian migration scholar Rainer Miinz during the summers
of 1996 and 1997, that I came to a fuller grasp of Ari's approach to
understanding migration processes. His ideas pervade this book, which I
can only hope will provide a useful complement to his work on the role
of states in shaping migration processes.

Although the list of others I wish to thank is long, I hope this will not
be regarded as merely a surreptitious effort at self-congratulation. The
fact that these people and institutions are to be found in several coun-
tries on three continents is both a measure of the good fortune I have
had in carrying out this project and testimony to the reality of an inter-
national community of scholars, of which I am thrilled to be a part.

Much of the research for this book was carried out while I held ajean
Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence,
Italy during 1995-96. Upon my arrival in the world's most beautiful city,
a young legal historian, Stefano Mannoni, insisted that the place for me
to conduct the research I wanted to do was the Library of the Chamber
of Deputies, situated happily in the shadow of the Pantheon in Rome.
Stefano called his friend, bibliotecario straordinario Mario di Napoli, on my
behalf, and the rest was smooth sailing. I am greatly indebted to Mario's
colleague Silvano Ferrari, who tracked down many an obscure source
for me and, if he couldn't find it, invited me to join him in the otherwise
closed stacks for the search. At the EUI, Raffaelle Romanelli's enthusi-
asm for the project helped sustain me through some uncertain times;
my friend Christian Joppke pushed me forward, and provided plenty of
good company.

For kindnesses, criticisms, assistance, suggestions, hospitality, cita-
tions, and occasionally quizzical looks, I wish to extend my sincere
gratitude to Peter Benda, Didier Bigo, Scott Busby, Kitty Calavita, Craig
Calhoun, Mathieu Deflem, Gary Freeman, Bernard Gainot, Janet
Gilboy, Phil Gorski, Valentin Groebner, Virginie Guiraudon, David
Jacobson, David Laitin, Leo Lucassen, Michael Mann, John McCormick,
Bob Moeller, Daniel Nordman, Giovanna Procacci, Marian Smith,
Peggy Somers, Yasemin Soysal, Anthony Richmond, Tim Tackett, Sara
Warneke, the late Myron Weiner, and Bruce Western. I am especially
grateful to Susan Silbey for inviting me to contribute this volume in the
Cambridge series on Law and Society.

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the course of writing this book, I have benefited greatly from the
largesse of several other institutions that have provided funding for
research or time away from regular academic duties, as well as congenial
surroundings in which to carry out the project. At a time in which pub-
lic support for scholarship is under sharp attack in the United States, I
wish to make special mention of a fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the award of which I regarded as a
particular honor. I was also delighted that the German Marshall Fund
found my work worthy of its support. In Paris, I enjoyed the assistance of
Professor Catherine Duprat at the Institut de PHistoire de la Revolution
Francaise and the hospitality afforded by the Maison Suger/Maison des
Sciences de l'Homme, whose director, Maurice Aymard, has been most
helpful. The University of California at Irvine has been supportive of me
and of this project, for which I am grateful.

I have talked about aspects of this project in venues too numerous to
indicate here, but I would nonetheless like to take this opportunity to
thank Charles Maier, Director of the Center for European Studies at
Harvard, and Nancy Green, a distinguished historian of migration at the
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, for invitations to speak
about this project at their respective institutions and for the helpful
comments I received on those occasions.

An earlier version of Chapter 1, together with the Conclusion,
appeared previously as "Coming and Going: On the State Monopoliza-
tion of the Legitimate 'Means of Movement'," Sociological Theory 16(3)
(November 1998): 239-59. That article has also appeared in French as
"Aller et venir: le monopole etatique des 'moyens legitimes de circula-
tion," Cultures et Conflits 31-2 (Automne-hiver 1998): 63-100. A French
translation of parts of Chapter 3 was published as "Le controle des passe-
ports et la liberte de circulation: Le cas de 1 Allemagne au XIXe siecle,"
Geneses: Sciences sociales et histoire 30 (March 1998): 53-76.

I must also thank my research assistants, Derek Martin and Sharon
McConnell, who helped me get under the trap door just before it came
down. Alas, unlike when Harrison Ford is involved, the door did not
remain open until there was time for one last act of heroism. I am grate-
ful to Phillipa McGuinness and Sharon Mullins at Cambridge University
Press for their enthusiasm about the project, and for holding the door
open just a little longer than they might have liked. I hope the result
justifies their patience.

Finally, my deepest thanks to Caroline, who made it all worthwhile.

xi

INTRODUCTION

In an obscure paragraph of a package of immigration reforms adopted
in 1996, the United States government committed itself to developing
"an automated system to track the entry and exit of all non-citizens, thus
providing a way of identifying immigrants who stay longer than their
visas allow." At the time that the legislation was supposed to be put into
effect, however, some in the government came to regard this measure as
likely to cause undue complications for millions of border-crossers, and
the implementation of the law was postponed for two and a half years.
The postponement was also deemed advisable in part because the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency mandated to design
the system, was far from having amassed the technology "to process
information estimated to be so vast that in one year it would exceed all
the data in the Library of Congress." 1 Clearly, this program would be an
enormous and unprecedented undertaking.

This book examines some of the background to such efforts to iden-
tify and track the movements of foreigners. The study concentrates on
the historical development of passport controls as a way of illuminating
the institutionalization of the idea of the "nation-state" as a prospectively
homogeneous ethnocultural unit, a project that necessarily entailed
efforts to regulate people's movements. Yet because nation-states are
both territorial and membership organizations, they must erect and sus-
tain boundaries between nationals and non-nationals both at their
physical borders and among people within those borders. 2 Boundaries
between persons that are rooted in the legal category of nationality can
only be maintained, it turns out, by documents indicating a person's
nationality, for there simply is no other way to know this fact about some-
one. Accordingly, a study that began by asking how the contemporary
passport regime had developed and how states used documents to con-
trol movement ineluctably widened to include other types of documents
related to inclusion and exclusion in the citizen body, and to admission
and refusal of entry into specific territories.

I argue that, in the course of the past few centuries, states have suc-
cessfully usurped from rival claimants such as churches and private
enterprises the "monopoly of the legitimate means of movement" - that

1

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

is, their development as states has depended on effectively distinguishing
between citizens/subjects and possible interlopers, and regulating the
movements of each. This process of "monopolization" is associated with
the fact that states must develop the capacity to "embrace" their own cit-
izens in order to extract from them the resources they need to
reproduce themselves over time. States' ability to "embrace" their own
subjects and to make distinctions between nationals and non-nationals,
and to track the movements of persons in order to sustain the boundary
between these two groups (whether at the border or not), has depended
to a considerable extent on the creation of documents that make the
relevant differences knowable and thus enforceable. Passports, as well
as identification cards of various kinds, have been central to these pro-
cesses, although documentary controls on movement and identification
have been more or less stringently developed and enforced in different
countries at various times.

This study focuses on the vicissitudes of documentary controls on
movement in Western Europe and the United States from the time of
the French Revolution until the relatively recent past. I begin with the
French Revolution because of its canonical status as the "birth of the
nation-state." Yet the transformation of states inaugurated by the French
Revolution turns out to have had much more to do with the gradual pro-
cess of inclusion of broad social strata in the political order than with the
construction of an ethnically "pure" French population, although I
examine efforts along these lines as well. The shift toward broader incor-
poration of the populace in political decision-making is reflected in the
controversies chronicled in Chapter 2, where I recount how the French
revolutionaries publicly debated the issue of passport controls on move-
ment for the first time in European history. Because I was intrigued by
the question of who supported and who opposed documentary controls
on movement in various contexts and why they did so, I have discussed
subsequent debates over these matters in other countries wherever I
have been able to find source materials. The narrative addresses the
legal history of passport controls in these countries until shortly after
the Second World War. I have said relatively little about the postwar
period, mainly because others have analyzed the process of European
unification and its attendant relaxation of documentary restrictions on
movement in greater detail than I could hope to do. 3 Instead, I have said
only enough about the postwar era to indicate some doubts about
whether we have entered into a period of "post-national membership,"
as some commentators have recently suggested. 4

The geographical frame of the study derives from my belief that the
dominance of Western states in the period examined has been relatively
clear-cut, and that the imposition of Western ways on most of the rest of

2

INTRODUCTION

the world has been one of the most remarkable features of the era. Here I
am only echoing what I take to be common wisdom about the rise and
dominance of the West during the modern age. This should not be taken
to imply any denigration of non-Western cultures, but only the recogni-
tion that those societies have not been sufficiently powerful to impose
their ways upon the world. Indeed, I would be delighted if this study were
to stimulate studies of systems of documentary controls on movement and
identity in other parts of the world and in other periods. 5 For now, how-
ever, it seems worthwhile to begin to make sense of the processes that
spawned the world-girdling system of passport controls on international
movement that arose from the gradual strengthening of state apparatuses
in Europe and the United States during the past two centuries or so.

Because the passport system arose out of the relatively inchoate inter-
national system that existed during the nineteenth century, I have not
undertaken strong, systematic comparisons of one country versus
another. I argue that the emergence of passport and related controls on
movement is an essential aspect of the "state-ness" of states, and it there-
fore seemed to be putting the cart before the horse to presume to
compare states as if they were "hard," "really-existing" entities of a type
that were more nearly approximated after the First World War.
Moreover, what is remarkable about the contemporary system of pass-
port controls is that it bears witness to a cooperating "international
society" as well as to an overarching set of norms and prescriptions to
which individual states must respond. 6 This does not mean, as some
seem to think, that there is no such thing as "sovereignty," but only that
this is a claim states make in an environment not of their own making. To
paraphrase Marx, states make their own policy, "but they do not make it
just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and trans-
mitted" from the outside.

The following study seeks to demonstrate that passports and other
documentary controls on movement and identification have been
essential to states' monopolization of the legitimate means of movement
since the French Revolution, and that this process of monopolization
has been a central feature of their development as states during that
period. The project has been motivated in considerable part by
the uneasy feeling that much sociological writing about states is insup-
portably abstract, failing to tell us how states actually constitute and
maintain themselves as ongoing concerns. By focusing not on the grand
flourishes of state-building but on what Foucault somewhere described
as the "humble modalities" of power, I hope to contribute to a more
adequate understanding of the capacity that states have amassed to
intrude into our lives over the last two centuries.

3

CHAPTER 1

COMING AND GOING: ON THE STATE
MONOPOLIZATION OF THE
LEGITIMATE "MEANS OF MOVEMENT"

In his writings, Karl Marx sought to show that the process of capitalist
development involved the expropriation of the "means of production"
from workers by capitalists. The result of this process was that workers
were deprived of the capacity to produce on their own and became
dependent upon wages from the owners of the means of production for
their survival. Borrowing this rhetoric, Marx's greatest heir and critic,
Max Weber, argued that a central feature of the modern experience was
the successful expropriation by the state of the "means of violence" from
individuals. In the modern world, in contrast to the medieval period in
Europe and much historical experience elsewhere, only states could
"legitimately" use violence; all other would-be wielders of violence must
be licensed by states to do so. Those not so licensed were thus deprived
of the freedom to employ violence against others. Following the rhetoric
used by Marx and Weber, this book seeks to demonstrate the proposi-
tion that modern states, and the international state system of which they
are a part, have expropriated from individuals and private entities the
legitimate "means of movement," particularly though by no means
exclusively across international boundaries.

The result of this process has been to deprive people of the freedom to
move across certain spaces and to render them dependent on states and
the state system for the authorization to do so - an authority widely held in
private hands theretofore. A critical aspect of this process has been that
people have also become dependent on states for the possession of an
"identity" from which they can escape only with difficulty and which may
significandy shape their access to various spaces. There are, of course,
virtues to this system - principally of a diplomatic nature - just as the
expropriation of workers by capitalists allows propertyless workers to

4

COMING AND GOING

survive as wage laborers and the expropriation of the means of violence by
states tends to pacify everyday life. Yet in the course of each of these trans-
formations, workers, aggressors, and travelers, respectively, have each
been subjected to a form of dependency they had not previously known.

Let me emphasize that I am not claiming that states and the state sys-
tem effectively control all movements of persons, but only that they have
monopolized the authority to restrict movement vis-a-vis other potential
claimants, such as private economic or religious entities. Such entities
may play a role in the control of movement, but they do so today at the
behest of states. Nor am I arguing that states' monopolization of the
legitimate means of movement is a generalization valid for all times and
places; the monopolization of this authority by states emerged only grad-
ually after the medieval period and paralleled states' monopolization of
the legitimate means of violence. My argument bears strong similarities
to that of John Meyer when he addresses the delegitimation of organiza-
tional forms other than the nation-state in the emerging "world polity."
Various non-state associations, Meyer writes

are kept from maintaining private armies, their territory and property are
subject to state expropriation, and their attempts to control their popula-
tions are stigmatized as slavery . . . although states routinely exercise such
controls with little question. A worker may properly be kept from crossing
state boundaries, and may even be kept from crossing firm boundaries by
the state, but not by the firm. 1

To be more precise, firms may keep a worker from crossing the bound-
aries of the firm, but they do so under authority granted them by the state.

An understanding of the processes whereby states monopolized the
legitimate means of movement is crucial to an adequate comprehension
of how modern states actually work. Most analyses of state formation
heretofore have focused on the capacity of states to penetrate societies,
without explicitly telling us how they effect this penetration. Such analy-
ses have posited that successful states developed the ability to reach into
societies to extract various kinds of resources, yet they typically fail to
offer any specific discussion of the means they adopted to achieve these
ends. Foucault's writings on "governmentality" and the techniques of
modern governance represent an important corrective to this tradition.
For all their preoccupation with policing, population, and "pastoral
power," however, Foucault's considerations of these matters lack any pre-
cise discussion of the techniques of identification that have played a
crucial role in the development of modern, territorial states resting on
distinctions between citizens/ nationals and aliens. 2

Meanwhile, analyses of migration and migration policies have tended
to take the existence of states largely for granted, typically attributing

5

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

migration to a variety of socioeconomic processes ("push-pull" processes,
"chain migration," "transnational communities," etc.) without paying ade-
quate attention to territorial states' need to distinguish "on the ground"
among different populations or to the ways in which the activities of states
- especially war-making and state-building - result in population move-
ments. The chief exception to this generalization has been to be found in
the writings of Aristide Zolberg, who has been urging for two decades that
the state-building (and state-destroying) activities of states should occupy
a central role in studies of human movement or its absence, alongside the
more routine examination of states' immigration policies. 3 Rather than
ignoring the role of states, studies of immigration policies take them as
given and thus fail to see the ways in which regulation of movement con-
tributes to constituting the very "state-ness" of states.

These approaches are inadequate for understanding either the devel-
opment of modern states or migration patterns. In what follows, I seek to
supersede these partial perspectives and to show that states' monopoliza-
tion of the right to authorize and regulate movement has been intrinsic to
the very construction of states since the rise of absolutism in early modern
Europe. I also attempt to demonstrate that procedures and mechanisms
for identifying persons are essential to this process, and that, in order to
be implemented in practice, the notion of national communities must be
codified in documents rather than merely "imagined." 4

In the remainder of this chapter, I undertake four tasks. First, I show
how and why states have sought to monopolize the "legitimate means of
movement" - that is, to gather into their own hands the exclusive right
to authorize and regulate movement. Next, I argue that the processes
involved in this monopolization force us to rethink the very nature of
modern states as they have been portrayed by the dominant strands of
sociological theories of the state. In particular, I seek to show that the
notion that states "penetrate" societies over time fails adequately to char-
acterize the nature of state development, and argue instead that we
would do better to regard states as "embracing" their citizenries more
successfully over time. Then, I analyze the need for states to identify
unambiguously who belongs and who does not - in order to "embrace"
their members more effectively and to exclude unwanted intruders.
Finally, I examine some of the efforts of early modern states in Europe
to implement documentary restrictions on movement, and thus to ren-
der populations accessible to their embrace.

MONOPOLIZING THE LEGITIMATE MEANS OF MOVEMENT

States have sought to monopolize the capacity to authorize the move-
ments of persons - and unambiguously to establish their identities in

6

COMING AND GOING

order to enforce this authority — for a great variety of reasons which
reflect the ambiguous nature of modern states, which are at once shel-
tering and dominating. These reasons include such objectives as the
extraction of military service, taxes, and labor; the facilitation of law
enforcement; the control of "brain drain" (i.e., limitation of departure
in order to forestall the loss of workers with particularly valued skills) ;
the restriction of access to areas deemed "off-limits" by the state,
whether for "security" reasons or to protect people from unexpected or
unacknowledged harms; the exclusion, surveillance, and containment
of "undesirable elements," whether these are of an ethnic, national,
racial, economic, religious, ideological, or medical character; and the
supervision of the growth, spatial distribution, and social composition of
populations within their territories.

States' efforts to monopolize the legitimate means of movement have
involved a number of mutually reinforcing aspects: the (gradual) defini-
tion of states everywhere - at least from the point of view of the
international system - as "national" (i.e., as "nation-states" comprising
members understood as nationals); the codification of laws establishing
which types of persons may move within or cross their borders, and deter-
mining how, when, and where they may do so; the stimulation of the
worldwide development of techniques for uniquely and unambiguously
identifying each and every person on the face of the globe, from birth to
death; the construction of bureaucracies designed to implement this
regime of identification and to scrutinize persons and documents in
order to verify identities; and the creation of a body of legal norms
designed to adjudicate claims by individuals to entry into particular spaces
and territories. Only recently have states actually developed the capacities
necessary to monopolize the authority to regulate movement.

To be sure, despotisms everywhere frequently asserted controls on
movement before the modern period, but these states generally lacked
the extensive administrative infrastructure necessary to carry out such
regulation in a pervasive and systematic fashion. The successful monopo-
lization of the legitimate means of movement by states and the state
system required the creation of elaborate bureaucracies and technolo-
gies that only gradually came into existence, a trend that intensified
dramatically toward the end of the nineteenth century. The process
decisively depended on what Gerard Noiriel has called the "revolution
identificatoire," the development of "cards" and "codes" that identified
people (more or less) unambiguously and distinguished among them
for administrative purposes. 5 Such documents had existed previously, of
course, but their uniform dissemination throughout whole societies, not
to mention their worldwide spread as the international passport with
which we are familiar today, would be some time in coming. Once they

7

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

became available to (almost) anyone, however, they also became a
requirement for legitimate movement across territorial spaces.

Things have not always been this way. The great migrations that pop-
ulated many of the world's inhabited regions would otherwise have been
greatly hampered, if not rendered impossible. Where the right to autho-
rize movement was controlled by particular social groups before the
coalescence of the modern state system (and indeed until well after it
had come into being), these groups were as often private entities as
constituted political authorities. Indentured servants' right to move, for
example, was under the control of their masters. Under serfdom, the
serfs' legal capacity to move lay in the hands of their landlords, who had
jurisdiction over them. Slavery, even when it did not involve actual
shackles, entailed that slaveholders held the power to grant their slaves
the right to move. 6

As modern states advanced and systems of forced labor such as slavery
and serfdom declined, however, states and the international state system
stripped private entities of the power to authorize and forbid movement
and gathered that power unto themselves. In doing so, they were
responding to a considerable extent to the imperatives of territorial rule
characteristic of modern states, as well as to the problem of "masterless
men" 7 as personal freedom advanced. The phenomenon is captured
nicely in Karl Polanyi's discussion of the emergence of "the poor" as a
distinctive group in early modern England:

[T]hey became conspicuous as individuals unattached to the manor, "or to
any feudal superior[,]" and their gradual transformation into a class of
free laborers was the combined result of the fierce persecution of vagrancy
and the fostering of domestic industry . . . 8

The transition from private to state control over movement was an essen-
tial aspect of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

The process through which states monopolized the legitimate means
of movement thus took hundreds of years to come to fruition. It followed
the shift of orientations from the local to the "national" level that accom-
panied the development of "national" states out of the panoply of
empires and smaller city-states and principalities that dotted the map of
early modern Europe. The process also paralleled the rationalization and
nationalization of poor relief, for communal obligations to provide such
relief were an important source of the desire for controls on movement.
Previously in the domain of private and religious organizations, the
administration of poor relief gradually came to be removed from their
purview and lodged in that of states. As European states declined in num-
ber, grew in size, and fostered large-scale markets for wage labor outside
the reach of landowners and against the traditional constraints imposed

8

COMING AND GOING

by localities, the provision of poor relief also moved from the local to the
national arena. 9 These processes, in turn, helped to expand "outward" to
the "national" borders the areas in which persons could expect to move
freely and without authorization. Eventually, the principal boundaries
that counted were those not of municipalities, but of nation-states.

The process took place unevenly in different places, following the
line where modern states replaced non-territorial forms of political
organization 10 and "free" wage labor replaced various forms of servi-
tude. Then, as people from all levels of society came to find themselves
in a more nearly equal position relative to the state, state controls on
movement among local spaces within their domains subsided and were
replaced by restrictions that concerned the outer "national" boundaries
of states. Ultimately, the authority to regulate movement came to be
primarily a property of the international system as a whole - that is, of
nation-states acting in concert to enforce their interests in controlling
who comes and goes. Where pronounced state controls on movement
operate within a state today, especially when these are to the detriment
of particular "negatively privileged" status groups, we can reliably expect
to find an authoritarian state (or worse). The cases of the Soviet Union,
Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, and Communist China (at
least before the 1980s) bear witness to this generalization."

The creation of the modern passport system and the use of similar
systems in the interior of a variety of countries - the product of cen-
turies-long labors of slow, painstaking bureaucratic construction - thus
signaled the dawn of a new era in human affairs, in which individual
states and the international state system as a whole successfully monopo-
lized the legitimate authority to permit movement within and across
their jurisdictions. The point here is obviously not that there is no
unauthorized (international) migration, but rather that such movement
is specifically "illegal"; that is, we speak of "illegal" (often, indeed, of
"undocumented") migration as a result of states' monopolization of the
legitimate means of movement. What we now think of as "internal"
movement - a meaningless and anachronistic notion before the devel-
opment of modern states and the state system - has come to mean
movement within national or "nation-states." Historical evidence indi-
cates clearly that, well into the nineteenth century, people routinely
regarded as "foreign" those from the next province every bit as much as
those who came from other "countries."

None of this is to say that private actors now play no role in the regu-
lation of movement - far from it. Yet private entities have been reduced
to the capacity of "sheriff s deputies" who participate in the regulation
of movement at the behest of states. During the nineteenth and into
the twentieth century, for example, governments in Europe pressed

9

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

steamship companies into overseeing for them whether particular people
should be permitted to travel to the destinations they had chosen. Since
the development of air travel, airline companies have been subjected to
similar obligations. Both shipping enterprises and air carriers have
frequently resisted carrying out the sheriffs deputy function, mainly
because they fear that their participation in such quasi-governmental
activities will hurt their profitability. Not wanting to appear guilty of mere
cupidity, however, they are likely to say that they regard the regulation of
movement as the proper province of the state - and so it is. 12

If, along with their efforts to monopolize the legitimate use of violence,
modern states also seek to monopolize the legitimate means of move-
ment, they must have means to implement the constraints they enunciate in
this domain. In order to do so, they must be able to construct an enduring
relationship between the sundry agencies that constitute states and both
the individuals they govern and possible interlopers. This fact compels us
to reconsider the principal line of sociological argumentation concerning
the way modern states have developed.

MODERN STATES: "PENETRATING" OR "EMBRACING"?

Previous sociological discussion of the development of modern states
has focused attention primarily on their growing capacity to "penetrate"
or "reach into" societies and extract from them what they need in order
to survive. Discussions of states as "penetrating" societies more effec-
tively during the modern period can be found in almost any major
recent sociological discussion of the nature of modern states. 13 Going
the state theorists one better, Jiirgen Habermas expanded the metaphor
of "penetration" to characterize the activity of both the modern bureau-
cratic state and the capitalist economy. Habermas thus speaks of the
"colonization of the life-world" by the "steering media" of money and
power. 14 Yet Habermas's analysis shares the weaknesses of the "penetra-
tionist" paradigm of state theory, for "money" is rather more concrete
than "power" as a mechanism for enabling and constraining social
choices. But we may correct for the abstractness of "power" relative to
that of money by seeing that identification papers of various kinds con-
stitute the bureaucratic equivalent of money: they are the currency of
modern state administration.

The traditional (and unmistakably sexual) imagery of societies being
"penetrated" by the state, however, unnecessarily and misleadingly nar-
rows our analytical vision about the nature of modern states. In particular,
the "penetrationist" approach has had little to say about the mechanisms
adopted and employed by states to construct and sustain enduring rela-
tionships between themselves and their subjects, the "social base" of their

10

COMING AND GOING

reproduction. The metaphor of the "penetration" of societies by states
thus distorts the nature of the process whereby states have amassed the
capacity to reconfigure social life by focusing our attention almost exclu-
sively on the notion that states "rise up" above and surmount the isolated
societies that seem, in this metaphor, to lie prostrate beneath them.
Willingly or unwillingly, the now-standard imagery of penetration
suggests, more or less weak societies simply receive the advances of more
or less powerful states. Having been penetrated, societies give up - to a
greater or lesser extent - what states demand of them. But how does this
actually happen? How are the people who make up "societies" compelled
to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's"?

In order to extract resources and implement policies, states must be
in a position to locate and lay claim to people and goods. This fact sug-
gests an alternative imagery to that of "penetration" for understanding
the accumulation of infrastructural capacity by modern states. Foucault
has of course stressed the importance of "surveillance" in modern
societies, but it often remains unclear in his writings to what particular
purposes surveillance is being put. I believe we would do well to regard
states as seeking not simply to penetrate but also to embrace societies,
"surrounding" and "taking hold" of their members - individually and
collectively - as those states grow larger and more administratively
adept. More than this, states must embrace societies in order to penetrate
them effectively. Individuals who remain beyond the embrace of the
state necessarily represent a limit on its penetration. The reach of
the state, in other words, cannot exceed its grasp. Michael Mann is cor-
rect that the "unusual strength of modern states is infrastructural," 15 and
their capacity to embrace their own subjects and to exclude unwanted
others is the essence of that infrastructural power.

My use of the term "embrace" derives from the German word erfassen,
which means to "grasp" or "lay hold of in the sense of "register." Thus, for
example, foreigners registered at the Auslanderbehorde (Agency for
Foreigners) are said to be " auslanderbehbrdlich erfasst' — i.e., registered for
purposes of surveillance, administration, and regulation by that agency.
People are also "erfassen" by the census. It says something important about
the divergent processes of state-building on the European continent and
in the Anglo-American world that we lack ordinary English equivalents for
the German "erfassen" (as well as for the French verb surveiller) . Whether
or not our language adequately reflects this reality, however, the activities
by which states "embrace" populations have become essential to the
production and reproduction of states in the modern period.

In contrast to the masculinized image of "penetrating" states sur-
mounting societies, the metaphor of states' "embrace" of societies directs
our awareness to the ways in which states bound - and in certain senses

11

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

even "nurture" - the societies they hold in their clutches. In this regard,
the imagery of "embracing" states shares similarities with Michael Mann's
notion of the way states "cage" social activity within them, particularly the
way in which the rise of national states tended to reorient political activity
from the local or regional to the national level. 16 Yet Mann's "caging"
metaphor fails to get at the way in which states metaphorically "grasp"
both entire societies and individual people in order to carry out their
aims. My metaphor of states "embracing" their populations is much more
akin to James Scott's idea that states seek to render societies "legible" and
thus more readily available for governance. 17

The notion that states "embrace" individuals goes further, however,
by calling to mind the fact that states hold particular persons within their
grasp, while excluding others. This consideration is especially important
in a world of states defined as nation-states - that is, as states comprising
members conceived as nationals - and concerned successfully to
monopolize the legitimate means of movement. In contrast, the imagery
of "penetration" is blind to the peculiarities of the society that the state
invades. Surely the metaphor of "embrace" helps make better sense of
a world of states that are understood to consist of mutually exclusive
bodies of citizens whose movements may be restricted as such.

Systems of registration, censuses, and the like - along with documents
such as passports and identity cards that amount to mobile versions of
the "files" states use to store knowledge about their subjects - have been
crucial in states' efforts to achieve these aims. Though not without flaws
and loopholes, of course, such registration systems have gone a long way
toward allowing states successfully to "embrace" their populations and
thus to acquire from them the resources they need to survive, as well as
to exclude from among the beneficiaries of state largesse those groups
deemed ineligible for benefits.

Modern "nation-states" and the international system in which they are
embedded have grown increasingly committed to and reliant upon their
ability to make strict demarcations between mutually distinct bodies of
citizens, as well as among different groups of their own subjects, when
one or more of these groups are singled out for "special treatment." The
need to sort out "who is who" and, perhaps more significandy, "what is
what" becomes especially acute when states wish to regulate movement
across external borders. This is because, as Mary Douglas wrote some
years ago, "all margins are dangerous . . . [A] ny structure of ideas is vul-
nerable at its margins." 18 The idea of belonging that is at the root of the
concept of citizenship is threatened when people cross borders, leaving
spaces where they "belong" and entering those where they do not.

Yet the nation-state is far more than a "structure of ideas." It is also -
and more importantly for our purposes - a more or less coherent

12

COMING AND GOING

network of institutions. In this respect, recent developments in sociology
turn our thinking in a fruitful direction when we try to make sense of
how states actually embrace the societies they seek to rule, and to distin-
guish their members from non-members. Rather than merely suggesting
the way institutions shape our everyday world, the "new institutionalism"
directs our attention to the "institutional constitution of both interests
and actors." 19

This point has a special relevance with regard to identities. Too fre-
quendy in recent academic writing, identities have been discussed in
purely subjective terms, without reference to the ways in which identities
are anchored in law and policy. This subjectivistic approach, given pow-
erful impetus by the wide and much-deserved attention given to
Benedict Anderson's notion of "imagined communities," tends to ignore
the extent to which identities must become codified and institutionalized
in order to become socially significant. Noiriel has made this point in the
strongest possible terms with respect to immigrants: "It is often over-
looked that legal registration, identification documents, and laws are
what, in the final analysis, determine the 'identity' of immigrants." 20

But the point is more general. The cases of "Hispanics" (as opposed
to Caribbeans or South or Central Americans, for example) or "Asian
Americans" (as opposed to Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans,
etc.) in the United States, categories designed for the use of census-
takers and policy-makers with little in the way of subjective correlates at
the time of their creation, are here very much to the point. Whether
substantial numbers of people think about themselves subjectively in
these terms is an open, empirical question; that they would not be likely
to do so without the institutional foundation provided by the prior legal
codification of the terms seems beyond doubt.

As nation-states - states of and for particular "peoples" defined as
mutually exclusive groups of citizens 21 - modern states have typically
been eager to embrace their populations, and to regulate the move-
ments of persons within and across their borders when they wish to do
so. Their efforts to implement such regulation have driven them toward
the creation of the means uniquely and unambiguously to identify indi-
vidual persons, whether "their own" or others. In order to monopolize
the legitimate means of movement, states and the state system have
been compelled to define who belongs and who does not, who may
come and go and who not, and to make these distinctions intelligible
and enforceable. Documents such as passports and identity cards have
been critical to achieving these objectives. Beyond simply enunciating
definitions and categories concerning identity, states must implement
these distinctions, and they require documents in order to do so in
individual cases.

13

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

GETTING A GRIP: INSTITUTIONALIZING THE NATION-STATE

In order to make sense of the notion that states exist "of and for particu-
lar peoples" generally understood today as "nations," we must first
consider what a "nation" is. The concept of the nation, according to
Weber, entails that we may "expect from certain groups a specific senti-
ment of solidarity in the face of other groups," without there being any
determinate "empirical qualities common to those who count as mem-
bers of the nation." 22 Following in Weber's footsteps, Rogers Brubaker
has stressed the "contingent, conjuncturally fluctuating, and precarious"
quality of "nation-ness," pointing out that: "We should not ask 'what is a
nation' but rather: how is nationhood as a political and cultural form
institutionalized within and among states?" 23 Brubaker's institutionalist
constructionism provides an important corrective to those views (typi-
cally held above all by nationalists themselves) that suggest that "the
nation" is a real, enduring historical entity. Failing their institutionaliza-
tion, "nations" must remain ephemeral and fuzzy.

How, indeed, is nationhood institutionalized? More specifically, pre-
cisely how is the nexus between states, subjects, and potential interlopers
generated and sustained? In order to extract the resources they need to
survive, and to compel participation in repressive forces where neces-
sary, states must embrace - that is, identify and gain enduring access to -
those from whom they hope to derive those resources. Alternatively,
states must be in a position to establish whether or not a would-be
entrant matches the criteria laid down for authorized entry into their
domains. Charles Tilly has noted that the French Revolution's inaugura-
tion of what he aptly calls "direct rule" gave rulers "access to citizens and
the resources they controlled through household taxation, mass con-
scription, censuses, police systems, and many other invasions of
small-scale social life." 24 Yet this listing leaves the matter too vague for
adequate comprehension of the way in which states have, in fact,
"invaded" small-scale social life and sought to render populations avail-
able to their embrace.

In particular, Tilly's enumeration of invasions leaves unclear how tax-
ation and conscription grew to depend decisively on mechanisms of
surveillance such as censuses, household registration systems, passports
(internal and external), and other identity documents. The activities
classically associated with the rise of modern states only became possible
on a systematic basis if states were in a position successfully to embrace
their populations for purposes of carrying out those activities. Such
devices as identity papers, censuses, and travel certificates thus were not
merely on a par with conscription and taxation as elements of state-
building, but were in fact essential to their successful realization and

14

COMING AND GOING

grew, over time, superordinate to them as tools of administration that
made these other activities possible or at least enforceable.

Sociologists of the state have begun in recent years to address more
adequately the problem of how states construct a durable relation
between themselves and their subjects /citizens in furtherance of their
own aims. This concern has been especially prominent in the work of
Anthony Giddens. In his important study The Nation-State and Violence,
Giddens pays considerable attention to the growing role of surveillance
in the development of "direct rule." In contrast to "traditional states,"
Giddens noted that modern states presuppose a regularized administra-
tion and that much of the necessary administrative capacity of modern
states is rooted in -writing. It is through written documents - such as iden-
tification papers - that much of the surveillance entailed by modern
state administration is carried out: "[Administrative power can only
become established if the coding of information is actually applied in a
direct way to the supervision of human activities . . ." 25 Max Weber had
earlier noted the importance of "the files" as an important element of
bureaucratization, of course, but he failed to indicate their enormous
role in the construction of states' enduring embrace of their citizens. Yet
despite the heightened attention to the relationship between states and
their subjects/citizens in recent writing on the development of state
capacities, we still have little idea of how this relationship is actually con-
structed and sustained.

The essence of the problem can be couched in terms of states' need
to be able to embrace their populations and to distinguish them from
others. From the point of view of states' interests in keeping track of
populations and their movements, people are little but "stigmata,"
appropriately processed for administrative use. The classic analysis of
the operation of and responses to stigmata in informal interaction is
Erving Goffman's discussion of Stigma? 6 where the burden of the analy-
sis is on the management of "spoiled identity." But the problem is more
pervasive than Goffman indicated, a fact that surely would have been
clear to him if he had devoted more attention to the operations of
bureaucratic institutions.

In one of his few sustained treatments of formal institutional environ-
ments, the irreplaceable essay on "total institutions" in Asylums, 21 Goffman
shows that the effort to impose control in such environments begins with
systematic attempts to annihilate the "identities" - the selves - of their
inmates. In total institutions, the point is to deprive individuals of the
personality resources that they might use to mount a defense against their
condition. "On the outside," however, obliteration of individual identity
would be ruinous to the state, for it would short-circuit the essential pro-
cess of identifying individuals for administrative purposes. This outcome

15

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

would frustrate the performance of those universal and indispensable
state activities, the extraction of resources from subjects to nourish the
administrative and coercive agencies that constitute and (assuming the
state continues to function coherently) continuously replenish states.

Michel Foucault extrapolated these basic insights into a nightmarish,
dystopic, even absurd vision of modern society as a "carceral" world
pervaded by "gentle" means of discipline and control carried out under
and through the watchful eye of the "individualizing gaze." 28 Foucault
dramatized this intuition by suggesting that Bentham's (never-built)
"Panopticon," in which individual prisoners could be seen by a centrally
located guard who was himself invisible to them, had become the basic
model of modern social organization. In a sense, Foucault only drew the
logical consequences from Weber's persistent fears about the jugger-
naut of bureaucratic rationalization. Yet Foucault's emphasis on the
intimate connections between power and knowledge, and on the crucial
importance of individual surveillance in modern administrative systems,
has proven enormously suggestive.

Indeed, the following passage from a manual for driver's license tests
issued by the State of California offers remarkably clear evidence of the
profound importance that identification practices have assumed in
modern times:

IDENTIFICATION: The issue of identification (ID) - its reliability,
integrity, confidentiality, etc. - is of prime concern to all levels of govern-
ment, and the private sector as well. The eligibility for government
services, the issuance of various licenses, the assessment of taxes, the right
to vote, etc., are all determined through evaluations based in part on the
identification documents you present. It becomes critical that ID documents
and systems be completely authenticated and accurate in order to positively and
uniquely identify each individual^

By their own lights, then, states have come decisively to depend on the
unique and unambiguous identification of individuals in order to carry
out their most fundamental tasks. 30 The examination of individual stig-
mata, the essential form of which lies at the heart of all modern systems
of identification, "places individuals in a field of surveillance [and also]
situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of
documents that capture and fix them." 31 The document held by the indi-
vidual as "ID" thus corresponds to an entire series of files chronicling
movements, economic transactions, familial ties, illnesses, and much
else besides - the power/knowledge grid in which individuals are
processed and constituted as administrative subjects of states.

The achievement of this administrative knowledge was a long time in
coming, however; state-sponsored identification practices with the aim

16

COMING AND GOING

of extending states' embrace of their populations have evolved signifi-
cantly over time. Prior to the French Revolution, for example,
descriptions of a person's social standing - residence, occupation, family
status, etc. - were generally regarded as adequate indicators of a
person's identity for purposes of internal passport controls in France. 32
Thereafter, the growing preoccupation with surveillance and the
progress of modern science combined to render insufficient these
earlier, more homespun practices. States wanted to embrace their inhab-
itants more firmly, and to be able to distinguish them from outsiders
more clearly, than was possible with such methods. Achievement of this
aim necessitated greater precision in identifying them. Yet at the same
time, the rise of liberal and natural law ideas proclaiming individual
freedom and the inviolability of the person cast into disfavor older
habits of "writing on the body" such as branding, scarification, and
tattooing, as well as dress codes as means for identifying persons (except
when these methods of marking are voluntarily assumed, of course).

As a result, states with a rising interest in embracing their populations
had to develop less invasive means to identify people. The approach they
adopted employs roughly the same principle that underlies ju^itsu: the
person's body is used against him or her, in this case as evidence of iden-
tity. Techniques for "reading off the body" have become more and more
sophisticated over time, shifting from unreliable subjective descriptions
and anthropometric measurements to photographs (themselves at first
often considered unreliable by police), fingerprinting, electronically
scanned palm-prints, DNA fingerprinting, and the retina scans drama-
tized in the recent film version of Mission: Impossible. The persistent
tinkering with these techniques indicates that states (and other entities,
of course) have a powerful and enduring interest in identifying persons,
both their own subjects and those of other countries. The ability of states
uniquely and unambiguously to identify persons, whether "their own" or
others, is at the heart of the process whereby states, and the interna-
tional state system, have succeeded over time in monopolizing the
legitimate means of movement in the modern world.

Against this background, let us briefly examine the imposition of
passport controls in early modern European states, as rulers increasingly
sought to establish untrammeled claims over territories and people.
Such rulers began to move away, however unintentionally, from a "polit-
ical map [that] was an inextricably superimposed and tangled one, in
which different juridical instances were geographically interwoven and
stratified, and plural allegiances, asymmetrical suzerainties and anoma-
lous enclaves abounded." 33 In doing so, they cleared away some of the
medieval underbrush that stood between them and the nation-state.

17

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

THE PREVALENCE OF PASSPORT CONTROLS IN ABSOLUTIST EUROPE

Passport controls in Europe are hardly a recent invention. The exigen-
cies of rule in early modern Europe led states to take a considerable
interest in strengthening their power to regulate the comings and
goings of their subjects. The mercantilist policies pursued by these states
entailed the general presupposition that population was tantamount to,
or at least convertible into, wealth and military strength. Accordingly,
these rulers had a powerful interest in identifying and controlling the
movements of their subjects. This they sought to do with a variety of
strictures on movement that frequently involved documents as the
means for their enforcement.

For example, with Prussia's Imperial Police Ordinances of 1548, beg-
gars and vagrants "were banned as a threat to domestic peace, law, and
order." Shortly thereafter, an edict of the Imperial Diet prohibited the
issuance of "passes" to "gypsies and vagabonds [Landstreicher]," suggest-
ing both that these two groups were in bad odor and that passes were
required as part of the normal procedure for removing from one place
to another, at least for those of the lower orders. 34 By the seventeenth
century, German rulers made laws intended to tie servants more firmly
to their masters, and thus also to squelch those bogeys of the official-
dom, vagrancy and itinerancy. 35

Meanwhile, across the Channel, similar developments had been afoot
for some time. Despite the guarantee of the English subject's freedom to
depart in the Magna Carta, a statute of 1381 forbade all but peers, notable
merchants, and soldiers to leave the kingdom without a license. 36 Early
modern English rulers were especially concerned that uncontrolled
departures would facilitate religious deviance. 37 Then, not long after the
English Civil War, an alleged upsurge in itinerancy generated by the desire
of the destitute to turn up more generous rates of poor relief than were
available in their native villages led the English monarch Charles II to
adopt a law severely restricting movement from one parish to another. The
"Act for the better Reliefe of the Poore of this Kingdom" of 1 662 s8 empow-
ered the local authorities to remove to their place of legal settlement
anyone "likely to be chargeable to the parish" - or, to put it in terms that
would later become familiar in American immigration legislation, anyone
"likely to become a public charge." At the same time, the law allowed
migration for purposes of performing seasonal or other temporary labor,
provided that the person or persons involved "carry with him or them a
certificate from the minister of the parish and one of the churchwardens
and one of the overseers for the poore" attesting to their legal domicile, to
which they were required to return upon completion of such work. These
laws governing movement helped to codify in law - and to implement in

18

COMING AND GOING

practice - a distinction between "local" and "foreign" poor, and notably
referred to the place to which illegal settlers should be removed as their
"native" residence. The act of removing oneself from one's place of birth
thus appears to have been regarded as an anomaly, and may indeed have
constituted a violation of the law without proper papers.

To the east, trends toward enhanced documentary controls on move-
ment received a powerful boost from Russian Czar, Peter the Great.
Eager to advance Russia's standing among the Continental powers,
Peter's modernizing reforms arose primarily from a desire to improve
the country's military capabilities. In this enterprise Peter was smash-
ingly successful, for by 1725 he had created the largest standing army in
Europe. 39 Such armies required extensive recruitment and, conse-
quently, systematic access to the young men of the country. One means
for the state to gain such access was to restrict mobility by requiring
documentation of movement and residence. Consistent with this aim,
the Czar in the early eighteenth century promulgated a series of decrees
regulating the domicile and travel of Russian subjects. An edict of 1719
required anyone moving from one town or village to another to have in
his (or less likely her) possession a pass from his superiors. 40 This ukase
only broadened the provisions of the legal code of 1649 that had origi-
nally consolidated the Russian pattern of serfdom, the very essence of
which lay in its controls on peasant movements. 41 The use of documents
as mechanisms of control made serfdom's legal restrictions on peasant
movements easier to enforce.

These examples demonstrate clearly that restrictions on personal
freedom of movement related directly to two central questions facing
burgeoning modern states: (1) how the economic advantages available
in a particular area were to be divided up, whether these involved access
to work or to poor relief; and (2) who would be required to perform
military service, and how they would be constrained to do so. In other
words, documentary controls on movement were decisively bound up
with the rights and duties that would eventually come to be associated
with membership - citizenship - in the nation-state.

Until the ultimate triumph of capitalism and the nation-state in
nineteenth-century Europe, however, controls on movement remained
predominantly an "internal" matter. This fact reflected the powerfully
local orientation of life and the law, as well as the persistence of mercan-
tilist ideas about population-as-wealth and the relatively inchoate
character of states and the international state system. Gradually, compe-
tition among states set in motion processes of centralization that
resulted in a winnowing of the number of competitors, such that only
those states capable of mobilizing sufficient military and economic
resources survived. 42

19

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

In the course of these developments, rulers seeking to expand their
domains and their grip on populations increasingly asserted their
authority to determine who could come and go in their territories. For
example, during the late medieval period in France, the legal concept of
the "foreigner" shifted from the local to the "national" level (at this
point the term can still only be applied anachronistically) , and from the
private realm to that of the state, as a consequence of the royal usurpa-
tion from the seigneurie of the so-called droit d'aubaine, according to
which foreigners had been defined as those born outside the seigneurie.

This [shift] created for the first time a kingdomwide status of foreigner
and, correlatively, an embryonic legal status of French citizen or national.
The legal distinction between French citizen and foreigner thus origi-
nated in the late medieval consolidation of royal authority at the expense
of seigneurial rights. 43

The monopolization of the legitimate means of movement by states
entailed their successful assertion of the authority to determine who
"belonged" and who did not. The state's complete expropriation of the
power to authorize movement would take some time to achieve, of
course, but they were well on their way to making this monopoly a reality.

To these more strictly political considerations must be added Karl
Polanyi's compelling portrayal of the decisive role of the early modern
state in weaving together local into national markets, a process that
frequently involved the triumph of the central state against fierce local
resistance. This gradual transformation facilitated a sea-change in con-
ceptions of "internal" and "external" territory and thus in the nature of
the restrictions on who could come and go, and with whose authoriza-
tion. 44 As markets for labor power, in particular, became "nationalized,"
states asserted dominion over the right to determine who could move
about and under what conditions. The general result of the process was
that local borders were replaced by national ones, and that the chief dif-
ficulty associated with human movement was entry into, not departure
from, territorial spaces. The spread of identification documents such as
passports was crucial to states' monopolization of the legitimate means
of movement. But this would take some time to achieve in practice, and
began by facing a sharp challenge from the libertarian elements in the
French Revolution. It is to the events of that upheaval, typically thought
of as the "birth of the nation-state," that we now turn.

20

CHAPTER 2

"ARGUS OF THE PATRIE" :
THE PASSPORT QUESTION
IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

THE PASSPORT PROBLEM AT THE END OF THE OLD REGIME

In his recent history of the state built by the French revolutionaries, Isser
Woloch has noted that "passports and certificates of residence [became]
extremely important documents as conscription became a way of life,"
and that "birth registers [were] the key to the whole process" of con-
scription, a process Woloch rightly regards as the revolutionaries' most
significant, enduring, yet improbable institutional achievement. 1 While
Woloch is correct that the success of conscription depended on bureau-
cratic mechanisms designed to identify and regulate the movements of
the citizenry, this approach to state administration would first have to
overcome vigorous antipathy toward such means by many of the partici-
pants in the revolutionary project.

Passport controls, in particular, had been a vital mechanism of domina-
tion under the old regime in France, and were clearly regarded as such by
those who made the revolution there in the late eighteenth century.
Among the many restrictions to which the French revolutionaries
objected was a 1669 edict of Louis XIV that had forbidden his subjects to
leave the territory of France, as well as to related requirements that those
quitting the Kingdom be in possession of a passport authorizing them to
do so. 2 In addition, commoners on the move within eighteenth-century
France were technically required to have one of two documents: a pass-
port issued by the town hall in the traveler's native village or the so-called
aveu, an attestation of upright character from local religious authorities.

The principal purpose of these documentary requirements was to
forestall any undesired migration to the cities, especially Paris. They
were at least occasionally effective in achieving their aims. Yet, as
Richard Cobb has pointed out: "France had a population that, in its vast

21

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

majority, walked; and there is no one more difficult to control than the
pedestrian." 3 Rather than issuing documents, under these circumstances
simply closing the gates of the town was a highly successful means of con-
trolling pedestrians, as viewers of the film version of Victor Hugo's Les
Miserables may recall. People who do not move in a container of some
sort are difficult to constrain, and the effort to restrict them may entail
turning the area to be controlled itself into a container.

Notwithstanding the documentary requirements in force in old
regime France, passports had a notorious propensity to go "lost," in
which case replacements were to be secured in the area in which the
traveler then found him- or herself (arrangements drastically at odds
with the situation today, where those who attempt to cross an interna-
tional border without satisfactory documentation are normally denied
entry or returned immediately to their point of departure). Even the
most unsavory figures apparently found it possible thus to get their
hands on the papers they needed, even though they might have been
denied them by the authorities in their place of origin. "Hence," as
Olwen Hufton has put it, "possession of a passport was not conclusive
evidence of innocence, and lack of one did not prove guilt." 1 Passport
restrictions were a nuisance for many, to be sure, but administrative
laxity and the well-meaning assistance of a variety of benefactors
frequently made a mockery of the state's use of documentary controls as
a means of regulating movement.

Despite the relative ease with which passport requirements could
often be skirted, these controls on movement appeared among the
many complaints regarding royal government and feudal organization
that were presented in the cahiers de doleances during the meeting of the
Estates General convened at Versailles in early 1789. Thus article 2 of the
cahiers of the parish of Neuilly-sur-Marne pleaded:

As every man is equal before God and every sojourner in this life must be
left undisturbed in his legitimate possessions, especially in his natural and
political life, it is the wish of this assembly that individual liberty be guaran-
teed to all the French, and therefore that each must be free to move about
or to come, within and outside the Kingdom, without permissions, pass-
ports, or other formalities that tend to hamper the liberty of its citizens. . . 5

On this view, passport controls and other "formalities" associated with
physical mobility undermined the natural and civil rights of the French.

In a debate that would last throughout the revolutionary period and
beyond, however, other petitioners to the Estates General demanded
more vigorous enforcement of the existing passport controls in the
interest of greater public security. For example, the order of the noblesse
du bailliage of Montargis urged in its cahiers that those charged with the

22

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

maintenance of public security be required to exercise "the most metic-
ulous oversight over the certificates and passports of vagabonds and
those without an aveu." 6 Yet one should bear in mind Georges Lefebvre's
estimation that the cahiers of the bailiwicks (bailliages) are even less rep-
resentative of the popular will than the grievances expressed by other
jurisdictions - which already tended to mute the voices of the peasantry
- because their betters often "simply eliminated from the original lists
those demands which displeased them or did not interest them." 7 As the
passport and the aveu were instruments of social control that plagued
primarily the lower orders, the demand of the Montargis notables may
well have reflected a bias in favor of the views of the privileged strata.

The representatives to the Estates General thus vied contentiously over
the liberty of people to circulate in France without documentary attesta-
tion, and the issue carried over into the discussions of the Constituent
Assembly after the fall of the Bastille. As a consequence of the Tennis
Court Oath, according to which the revolutionaries had pledged in late
June 1789 not to leave Paris without completing work on a new constitu-
tion, 8 the assembly ironically found itself on 9 October 1789 discussing the
freedom of its own members to move about. The "October Days" had
begun, and the Assembly was under intense pressure to resolve food short-
ages that had galvanized the common people into action.

The debate was joined after the president of the house sought the
authority to issue or deny the passports that had been requested of him
by various members of the Assembly. Dividing the two sides of the debate
was the question whether one could limit the freedom of the deputies by
denying them passports, on the one hand, and whether deputies should
leave their posts in the country's hour of need, particularly given that
the foot-soldiers of the nation would not be allowed to do so, on the
other. In the end, the Assembly granted its president the authority to
issue passports to its members, thus making the liberal choice that free-
dom of movement was to be preferred to constraint, even under
conditions of substantial domestic political tension. 9 The forces support-
ing free movement seem to have gained the high ground more generally
as well, for according to Donald Greer, a prominent historian of the
revolutionary emigration: "During the greater part of the period . . .
1789-1792, Frenchmen were free to go and come as they pleased." 10

Yet Greer's judgment here is misleading in at least two respects. First,
contrary to what our contemporary sensibilities might lead us to expect,
the freedom to come and go to which Greer refers was not restricted to
the native population. With the outbreak of the revolution, France had
welcomed into its bosom a considerable number of persons not of
French origin, many of whom were political refugees from their noble-
dominated countries and favorably predisposed toward revolutionary

23

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

ideology. Such "friends of liberty" were widely indulged in the cos-
mopolitanism of the revolutionaries. 11 Second and more importantly,
one must bear in mind that this was a period of grain riots, rural revolt,
and ultimately the threat of foreign invasion and war. Many people long
familiar with the restrictions on movement characteristic of the ancien
regime remained anxious about the idea of free-floating marauders and
the footloose poor coming and going as they pleased. Greer's estimate
thus misleads because it focuses upon the freedom of the French to
enter and leave their country rather than on the liberty to move within
the Kingdom, which at this point remained very much a live issue -
indeed, for most of the French, the primary one.

Greer's optimistic view of freedom of movement among the French
during this period sits awkwardly, for example, with the evidence of a
decree of the National Assembly dated 30 May - 13 June 1790. The mea-
sure was provoked when the Assembly learned that "a great number of
foreign mendicants" were taking advantage of the poor relief in Paris to
the detriment of the indigenous indigent. The term "foreigner" here
applied principally to French citizens from outside the capital. In order
to assert greater control over eligibility for poor relief in France's princi-
pal city, the decree required every non-French beggar or person without
an aveu who had not been domiciled in Paris for at least one year, as well
as mendicant French persons resident in Paris for less than six months, to
leave Paris and to obtain a passport indicating the route they would fol-
low in leaving the Kingdom or returning to their native place. Those who
departed from the route indicated in their passports, or who stopped
along the way for any length of time, were to be arrested by the national
guards or departmental police and required to explain themselves. 12

The persistence of these kinds of restrictions soon provoked the ire of
a commentator named "Peuchet," who was given space in Le Moniteur,
one of the principal outlets for revolutionary debate, to publish a
scathing indictment of "the slavery of passports" in mid-1790. Insisting
that the French state had delivered up the individual's "movements and
his conduct to a surveillance as extensive as it is dangerous" and that
every person should be free "to breathe the air he chooses without hav-
ing to ask permission from a master that can refuse him that right,"
Peuchet declared passports "contrary to every principle of justice and
reason" and demanded their abolition. He also noted that, as the provi-
sions of the law discussed above suggest, the constraints on freedom
represented by passport requirements fell especially hard on "the poor
and obscure class of people." 13 In Peuchet's liberal view, passport con-
trols were part and parcel of the tyrannical, freedom-choking strictures
of the ancien regime. In response to criticism of his remarks, which were
interpreted by his detractors as "favoring those guilty of crimes" because

24

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

the abolition of passports would allegedly allow them to escape the grasp
of the law, Peuchet retorted that this was far from his aim, which con-
cerned the fundamental human right to come and go: "To allow a man
to travel is to allow him to do something that one has no right to deny: it
is a social injustice." 14 .

THE FLIGHT OF THE KING AND THE REVOLUTIONARY RENEWAL OF
PASSPORT CONTROLS

These criticisms of the restraints on freedom of movement notwithstand-
ing, attitudes toward free circulation in France changed dramatically with
the flight of the King on 21 June 1791. The stage had already been set
for a backlash against free movement during the previous months. In
February, the departure of the King's aunts had caused a furor in the
radical press and given rise to stillborn efforts of the Constituent
Assembly to stiffen emigration controls. 15 Then, in March and April,
Pope Pius VI officially condemned both the principles of the revolution
and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and "in an act of incalculable
importance the Church of Rome opposed its doctrine to the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and Citizen." 16 Those inclined toward counterrevo-
lutionary activity were greatly heartened by the Church's stance. Against
this background, Louis XVI absconded for Varennes disguised as a valet.
In a state of shocked alarm at the King's attempted escape, the National
Assembly mandated a complete halt to departures from the Kingdom
and the arrest of anyone attempting to leave. 17

The Assembly debate over responsibility for authorizing the passports
under which the King's party had traveled revealed considerable admin-
istrative confusion in this area. In order to clarify the circumstances
under which the royal retinue had sought to make off, the Assembly
summoned Louis XVTs foreign minister, Montmorin, to its chambers to
explain how they had come into possession of their passports. The for-
eign minister was accused of having furnished the passports under
assumed names, and thus of collaborating in the King's escape attempt.
In response to the Assembly's inquiry, Montmorin noted that "with the
large number of passports [the foreign minister] signs, it is impossible
for him to verify whether the name of the persons who request them is
true or false." Clearly, a great deal of administrative rationalization
would be required before we would reach our present state, in which the
effort to acquire documents under an assumed name involves consider-
able difficulty and ingenuity.

Ultimately, Montmorin was absolved of having surreptitiously issued
the passports under assumed names. The King had masqueraded as a
valet during the escape attempt, but he was able to do this because

25

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

passports for the nobility typically included a number of persons listed
by their function but without further description ("a valet"), and not as
a result of any connivance on the foreign minister's part. The judgment
of his innocence came none too soon for Montmorin, whose house was
being besieged by crowds who held him responsible for facilitating the
King's getaway. The Assembly immediately sent four representatives to
announce its findings and thus, it hoped, to forestall any harm to
Montmorin 's person or property at the hands of the angry mob. 18

Tempers and apprehensions flared throughout France in the after-
math of the royal escape attempt. According to Georges Lefebvre, "no
one doubted that the King's flight heralded invasion," and the National
Assembly thus added to its prohibition on departures a call-up of 169
infantry battalions to be raised from among the National Guard.
Frontier garrisons prepared for invasion. A "great fear" swept the coun-
try, provoking violent retribution against aristocrats and refractory
priests as well as attacks on their property. 19

With the spectre of aristocratic conspiracies stalking the land, the
King's flight not only provoked the deputies of the Constituent Assembly
to seal the borders; it also appears to have inflamed rogue popular forces
to throttle departures from Paris of which they disapproved. On 22 June
1791, the city's mayor issued an order enjoining the Parisian citizenry to
permit the exit from the city of those equipped with passports, which he
promised would be issued with "discretion and prudence." 20 Under these
conditions, possession of a passport bore witness to the revolutionary
state's approval of movement by its bearer; it thus functioned as a "safe-
conduct" of a kind that would later be associated only with movement
into other sovereign jurisdictions, at least in times of peace. This would
not be the last time that extralegal elements would contest the state's
monopoly on the legitimate right to authorize movement. Indeed, this
sort of popular usurpation of the "legitimate means of movement" is
typical of situations in which states are being revolutionized or have
disintegrated.

Despite the move to close the borders in response to the King's flight,
the revolutionary Assembly was, like the Parisian authorities, beset by a
concern to insure freedom of movement throughout the interior of the
country. Accordingly, the Constituent Assembly only three days later
decreed that it was necessary to uphold the right to "free circulation of
persons and things," at least up to a distance of ten limes from the bor-
der, and that all the administrative, municipal, and military authorities
should cooperate to guarantee such freedom. The proponent of the
decree defended it above all on administrative grounds, noting that the
Assembly's various measures to defend the Kingdom would be futile "if
the couriers carrying these orders are stopped in every municipality

26

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

along the way in order to undergo verification of their passports." 21 At
this point, at least, the leaders of the revolution wanted to open up the
French territorial space to free movement on administrative, commer-
cial, and liberty grounds. Frontier areas were regarded as "hot,"
however, for here the administrative and municipal organs were to
"keep watch meticulously." 22

Then, just a week after slamming shut the gates to departures of
French citizens from France, the Assembly also decreed that foreigners
and French merchants would be free to leave the Kingdom. Before
doing so, however, foreigners were to be in possession of a passport
supplied by the ambassador from their own country or by the French
ministry of foreign affairs, whereas the French merchants were required
to obtain a passport from their own or the nearest district capital. In
order to avoid a repetition of the sort of disguised escape attempted
by the King, article 7 of the decree mandated that "all passports are to
contain the number of persons to whom they are given, their names,
their age, their description, and the parish inhabited by those who have
obtained them, who are obliged to sign both the register of passports
and the passports themselves." 23 This provision had been included in the
final decree after a member of the Assembly had found insufficient the
passport requirements for departure from the realm. Without descrip-
tions (les signalements) , this critic admonished, those who wished to slip
out of the country would have had little difficulty doing so. 24

In early August 1791, the Constituent Assembly sought to enhance
French strength by encouraging the many frightened and disillusioned
emigres who had departed after the outbreak of the revolution to return
home. As Greer has put it, this was "a prelude dolce to the later harsh leg-
islation" on emigration and the emigres. The law upheld the ban on
departures from the country and enjoined those who had left after 1 July
1789, to return within one month. "Those who complied were to suffer
no penalties; those who disobeyed were to be fined by the triplication of
their taxes concurrent with their absence." But the law was weak and
remained in force only a little more than a month, when the National
Assembly nullified it. 25 Despite the apparently conciliatory attitude toward
the emigres expressed by the Assembly in this law, worse - much worse -
awaited those who had left France after the onset of the revolution.

What is remarkable about all these regulations from our contempo-
rary standpoint is that the group whose movements the defenders of the
revolution were concerned to regulate consisted primarily of their fel-
low French citizens. Not without reason, the revolutionary leadership
regarded the emigres - as potential enemies of the revolution in league
with the King, reactionary priests and nobles, and foreign powers - as a
profound threat to its survival. 26 And of course there were many others

27

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

who were viewed with suspicion, and hence as deserving of surveillance
and sharpened control. A notion of "foreignness" underlay this attitude,
but it was not the same as that now-familiar version that reflects the
rivalries of narcissistic nation-states. In his famous pamphlet "What is
the Third Estate?" of January 1789, the Abbe Sieyes had written of the
nobility: "This class is assuredly foreign to the nation because of its
do-nothing idleness." 27 This "political" rather than national definition of
the foreigner owed everything to the fact that the revolution had burst
upon the stage of world history by defining "the nation" principally in
terms that excluded a slothful, parasitic nobility, rather than people
from other countries.

At this point, at least, the term "foreigners" therefore applied as
much to those who opposed the revolution, regardless of their "national"
origins, as it did to persons not of French birth. Reflecting this cos-
mopolitan view, one contemporary commentator tellingly remarked,
"The only foreigners in France are bad citizens." 28 Foreignness in the
legal sense remained a murky business. The clarification of the legal
concept of the foreigner, whose movements were to be restricted as such,
would first require much impassioned debate and bureaucratic develop-
ment, and would ultimately be forged in the fires of military conflict. 29
Noiriel has written that the modern conception of the "foreigner" came
into being with the French Revolution as a result of the elimination of
feudal privileges on 4 August 1789, which formally created a national
community of all French citizens. 30 This Act was, however, in inherent
and insoluble tension with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen, which proclaimed the equality of all individuals and thus tended
to promote the rights of foreigners as such. Ever since, politics have been
driven by the dynamics deriving from that tension.

In an important contribution to the newly proclaimed equality of
French citizens, the revolutionaries began to move during this time
toward the codification of a uniform national space in which goods and
persons would be permitted to circulate freely. One of the first steps taken
by the leaders of the revolution to obliterate local particularism in favor of
national integration had been the creation of departements to replace the
old provinces into which France had traditionally been divided. In the
process, it took the names of the eighty-three new departments from their
geographical features and replaced the thirty-six royal intendancies with
new departmental capitals in order to sweep away the spatial relics of the
ancien regime. The departmentalization of France was designed to achieve
the aim laid out by Sieyes in September 1789: "France is and ought to be a
single whole, uniformly subordinated in all its parts to a single legislation
and one common [system of] administration." 31 In furtherance of this

28

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

objective, the National Assembly gradually pushed outward to the
"national" borders the toll barriers for goods. 32 Georges Lefebvre
counted the smiting down of internal frontiers among the chief results
of the revolution; a uniform administration was created before which
each and every French citizen stood equally, at least in theory, and "the
national market was realized, insofar as means of communication
permitted it." 33 Yet the right to untrammeled internal freedom of move-
ment still remained to be achieved.

THE CONSTITUTION OF 1791 AND THE ELIMINATION OF PASSPORT
CONTROLS

Not long after the uproar sparked by the King's flight and the attendant
restrictions on the movements of the French, the National Assembly
completed its new constitution for France after two and a half years'
work. When it did so, the matter of controls on movement occupied a
central place in its deliberations. The first three "natural and civil rights"
promulgated by the Assembly were relatively general provisions dealing
with equality before the law. Then, the very first concrete "natural and
civil right" guaranteed by the Constitution of 3-14 September 1791, was
that of the freedom "to move about, to remain, [and] to leave." 34
Although the ordering of the articles may have been somewhat arbi-
trary, this article preceded even the Constitution's enumeration of those
rights that Americans, at least, normally think of as foundational -
namely, freedom of speech and assembly. 35

The Assembly became more specific about its defense of the freedom
of movement on 13 September. During that day's deliberations, the
Marquis de Lafayette proposed - and the Assembly greeted with sus-
tained applause - the abolition of all controls, especially including
passports, on the movements of the French citizenry, as well as an end to
the order mandating the pursuit and arrest of emigres that had been
imposed in the 21 June decree barring departures. 36 The decree as
adopted stated that "there will no longer be any obstacles impeding the
right of every French citizen to travel freely within the realm, and to
leave it at will," and specifically eliminated passports. Flush with the glow
of having set out a document recognizing the equality of all French citi-
zens before the law, the revolutionaries were in an expansive mood that
extended even to forgiveness for the emigres. The records of the pro-
ceedings indicate that the members of the Assembly believed they were
making a major contribution to the cause of human freedom when they
abolished passport controls on the French people, which they viewed as
part and parcel of the arbitrary power of the ancien regime? 1

29

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

Soon, however, the practical implications of this much-ballyhooed
liberalization began to make themselves clear. Greer has described the
results as follows:

The consequences were ominous. The emigres of yesterday met the
emigres of tomorrow on the roads to the frontiers, and the latter
outnumbered the former. Those who had hoped that the amnesty would
inaugurate a phase of reconciliation were disillusioned and alarmed. 38

There was reason enough for alarm; hostile armies, of emigres and their
allies, were massing beyond the Rhine.

In response, the Legislative Assembly - a newly constituted body with
entirely different membership and perspectives than its predecessor -
passed a decree on 9 November 1791, declaring all French persons gath-
ered outside the borders of the Kingdom to be under suspicion of
conspiracy against the patrie. Anyone still so assembled after 1 January
was to be considered guilty of such conspiracy and subject to the death
penalty. 39 The decree was rendered ineffectual, however, when the King,
whose approval was required for the enactment of the Assembly's laws,
vetoed it. The Bill nonetheless reflected a dramatic shift in mood from
the ebullient September days. It was during this period that the Gironde
rose to prominence under the leadership of Brissot, Vergniaud, and
others, and "leftist" measures found increasing resonance in the
Legislative Assembly. 40

At the same time, the change of mood within and the growing fears
of invasion from without led some departements, especially on the fron-
tiers, to intensify passport and other controls on foreigners. For
example, the departement du Nord issued regulations in mid-December
1791 requiring foreigners (etrangers) entering its villages and towns to
present themselves to the authorities to have their passports checked
and to receive (or be denied) permission to remain. A census was also
to be kept so that the authorities would be in a position to inform the
departmental directory about "the measures taken by the municipali-
ties to prevent gatherings of foreigners" and "to insure the most exact
policing with respect to foreigners." 41 It was not only frontier depart-
ments that went ahead and abrogated the National Assembly's
pronouncements when they felt the need; in the debate over the
reintroduction of passport controls in the Assembly in early 1792, one
member noted that the departement of Maine-et-Loire, north-east of the
Vendee, had also decided to reinstitute passport controls during the
preceding months. 42

It was with little steps such as this that the definition of the "foreigner"
during the revolution slowly drifted toward the notion which nowadays
has come to be taken for granted: that is, a foreigner is someone from

30

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

another country whose trustworthiness is questionable. Indeed, accord-
ing to Sophie Wahnich, with this ordinance the surveillance of
foreigners becomes institutionalized "not simply in the order of normal-
ized police practices, but in the order of writing . . . [T]he process of
identification comes into conflict with the free circulation of persons
. . ." 4S State officials were beginning to recognize that surveillance of
untrustworthy elements defined in a priori terms - separate and apart
from any actions they might have committed - had to be codified in writ-
ing, for there is no other way to identify "the foreigner."

The matter of revolutionary hospitality toward foreigners had hardly
yet been definitively decided, however. Only two weeks after the promul-
gation of the departement du Nord decree, the philosopher Condorcet
delivered himself of an eloquent speech insisting that France would never
give itself over to a narrow-minded nationalism, even in time of war:

The asylum that [France] opens to foreigners will never be closed to the
inhabitants of countries whose princes have forced us to attack them, and
they will find in its womb a secure refuge. Faithful to the commitments
made in its name, [France] hastens to fulfill them with a generous exacti-
tude. The dangers it faces may not permit it to forget that French soil
belongs entirely to freedom, and that the law of equality must be univer-
sal. It presents to the world the novel spectacle of a nation truly free,
subject to the rules of justice despite being caught up in the storms of war,
and respecting everywhere and at all times with regard to all people the
rights that are the same for all. 44

Yet Condorcet's revolutionary cosmopolitanism would be put to the test
soon enough. Brissot declared on 31 December that "the time has come
for a new crusade, a crusade for universal freedom." 45 Whether this
beautiful crusade was intended to install human freedom or French
domination in the territories to which it advanced depended, however,
on the eye of the beholder. In any case, many in France itself did not
share Condorcet's openness to outsiders - whether legal foreigners or
mere "strangers" - as war loomed on the horizon.

Around this time, for example, the municipal government of Paris
found it necessary to rein in the confusion surrounding another type of
document used by the state to "embrace" individuals, the "certificates of
residence." The commissioners responsible for their issuance had
informed the city's leaders that these important papers were "multiplying
toward infinity." Thenceforward, instead of being issued by the authorities
immediately upon demand, the certificates were to be requested, signed,
and registered by two different agencies, and were only to be delivered
after a hiatus of two days from the initial request. 46 By slowing the process
down and making it more complicated, the municipal government
decided, the administration would be less likely to give out these valuable

31

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

documents to undeserving persons - a matter of some concern to a city
plagued by the intensifying demands of revolutionary upheaval.

Aside from merely authorizing domicile in particular places, certifi-
cates of residence were closely tied in to the provision of public welfare,
particularly pensions. A decree handed down by the Legislative
Assembly in December 1791 required that anyone - with the exception
of merchants appropriately vouched for by municipal authorities -
receiving a variety of payments from the public purse had to produce a
certificate attesting that he or she currently resided in the French
Empire, and had done so without interruption for the previous six
months. The certificate of residence was to be issued by the municipality
where the person was actually domiciled, and visaed within eight days by
the district directory. 47 In a move that presaged practices that would
grow commonplace as welfare states began to take hold on a national
scale, the Legislative Assembly sought to ease the strain on French
coffers by tightening eligibility for state transfer payments - as well as its
documentary attestation. Although they go unmentioned in the text of
the decree, this measure was obviously directed at the emigres, who were
thought to have rendered themselves unworthy of public largesse
during the previous six months by fleeing the patrie'm its hour of need.

THE DEBATE OVER PASSPORT CONTROLS OF EARLY 1792

The ranks of those in the Assembly inclined to reverse course regarding
the freedom of movement in general, and passport controls in particu-
lar, swelled in proportion to the darkening of the clouds of war.
Controversy in the Legislative Assembly over the reintroduction of
passport restrictions thus grew boisterous early in 1792, as war came to
seem increasingly imminent. On 7 January Assembly Member Le Coz,
Bishop of the Breton departement of Ille-et-Vilaine, rose to demand that
the Assembly take action on a steady stream of petitions from the departe-
ments throughout France which, at least so he claimed, complained of
the upsurge in brigandage that had followed the suppression of passport
controls, and pleaded with his colleagues for their reestablishment. 48

Le Coz was very much on the side of those who wished to restore
passport restrictions. During the course of the parliamentary debate that
his pleas initiated - a debate that extended over several days and gener-
ated considerable passion and eloquence - Le Coz would dub passports
the "Argus of the patrie." 49 (In classical mythology, Argus was a monster
with many eyes who was therefore regarded as a good watchman.) It is
perhaps noteworthy that Le Coz coined this phrase almost simultane-
ously with Jeremy Bentham's proposal in the early 1 790s of what Karl
Polanyi called Bentham's "most personal Utopia," the Panopticon. 50

32

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The participants in the controversy over the reintroduction of pass-
port controls during the French Revolution gave expression to a number
of motifs that would reappear later as prominent features in other leg-
islative debates about passport restrictions. It is thus useful to examine
the debate in some detail. To begin with, however, both sides in the
debate recognized that the requirement that travelers be in possession of
a passport entailed a certain presumption of guilt - a presupposition that
travelers were up to no good and might be moving about under pre-
tenses contrary to those deemed acceptable by the revolutionary regime.

For the advocates of the reinstitution of passport controls on the
French citizenry, however, such requirements comprised a tolerable
infringement on freedom in defense of the revolution's broader achieve-
ments. Joseph Francois Lemalliaud, an Assembly representative from the
Breton departement of Morbihan and a staunch supporter of the revolu-
tion, 51 articulated this view in his comments on an agitated letter from the
Morbihan procurer-general demanding the reintroduction of passports in
order to get the upper hand over the "brigands" who "infested the roads"
of that region. Passport requirements, according to Lemalliaud, "may per-
haps afflict the bad citizens, but the true friends of liberty would gladly
support this minor inconvenience." In other words, genuine patriots
would accept that their freedom might be modestly curtailed in order to
defend the larger freedoms won by the revolution - freedoms that were
being threatened by homegrown counterrevolutionaries, emigres, and
autocratic foreign powers. These petty restrictions were not too much to
ask of true defenders of the greater liberties won by the revolution.

Lemalliaud 's proposal was seconded by another Assembly representa-
tive who noted that the nearby departement of Maine-et-Loire (Anjou) had
already felt compelled to reestablish passport controls and that "substan-
tial contingents of troops composed of brigands and those without an
aveu are forming at the borders" of Brittany and Anjou. In this view, the
lack of an aveu was itself evidence of counterrevolutionary intent; the
obvious remedy was to reassert and strengthen the authority of the state
to authorize and regulate movement. The widespread enthusiasm for the
reintroduction of passport controls among revolutionaries from these
areas arose from the fact that they were plagued by popular disturbances
during this period. In August, aristocrats and refractory priests had
provoked disturbances in the Vendee, immediately south-west of the
Maine-et-Loire, and rightists fomented trouble throughout the region
during subsequent months. 52 One of the deputies objected that the pass-
port could not simply be reintroduced without the matter being
discussed by the Assembly's Committee on Legislation, but the Assembly
declared passport requirements restored and directed that committee to
report the following day on "how to make this measure effective." 53

33

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

The rapporteur of the committee on legislation, an ally of Lemalliaud
from Ille-et-Vilaine named Codet, responded to the Assembly's request
with a proposed law to reestablish passport controls "temporarily." 54 The
committee argued that, "in this moment of crisis," foreigners required
"the particular attention of the administrative bodies." The hearts of
.some foreigners were "entirely French," to be sure, but others were
suspects, traitors prepared "to betray the sacred rights of hospitality."
Therefore, "without molesting foreigners too much," the committee
urged the Assembly to "watch them with the most scrupulous attention
... to follow their paths and foil their plots." In order to facilitate the
achievement of these ends, all travelers within France were to have their
passports visaed in every district, while those leaving the Kingdom were
to submit to this formality at the directory of the frontier departement
where they would be crossing the border. To carry out these bureau-
cratic tasks, the committee's proposal authorized all gendarmes and
active National Guardsmen to examine passports, and empowered all
officers of the gendarmerie to issue warrants for the arrest of those with-
out a valid passport. The bill proposed penalties for those who refused
properly to identify themselves to the state, for failure to do so "renders
one culpable, manifests perverse intentions, contravenes the law . . ."

As he introduced the bill into the Assembly, Codet noted that the
committee found important sources for its proposal in earlier decrees of
the Constituent Assembly, particularly its "Law on the Municipal Police"
of 19 July 1791. 55 That law included a requirement that municipal
authorities conduct a census of all inhabitants, as well as a register of the
declarations of those canvassed that was to include a variety of personal
information such as name, age, place of birth, previous domicile, occu-
pation, and means of subsistence. Those lacking the last mentioned
were to indicate the name of a local resident who was prepared to vouch
for them. Workers without either means of subsistence or a sponsor were
to be registered as gens sans aveu; those who failed to indicate a previous
domicile as "suspicious persons" (gens suspects) ; and, finally, those shown
to have made false declarations were to be identified as "ill-intentioned
persons" (gens malintentionnes) .

The committee then recommended as an "indispensable condition"
that every passport include an extract of the person's municipal declara-
tion.

If the traveler is honest, his passport will be an advantageous document
for him, and it will flatter him; if he is not honest, it is necessary that his
passport will put him under surveillance throughout the Kingdom . . .
With this correspondence [of passport and municipal register], the law on
passports will complement all the other measures already taken for the
security of the realm. 36

34

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Despite the general perception that passport requirements constituted
an illiberal restriction on the freedom of movement, Codet was arguing,
in effect, that these documents would protect the "honest" man while
helping to flush out the politically or morally dubious.

In the course of the debate, the Jacobin firebrand Jean-Francois
Delacroix expanded upon this notion, suggesting that the passport, far
from entailing a presumption of guilt, was in fact a "certificate of pro-
bity" insuring the security of those traveling in France. 57 There was
something in Delacroix's view: if state authorities had the right to
demand some independent verification of a person's identity and some
justification of his or her whereabouts, as Codet had insisted they did,
possession of a document attesting to these matters would provide a cer-
tain security to the would-be traveler. Only under conditions of pure
freedom to come and go, irrespective of who or what a person is, would
a passport constitute nothing but a restriction. Once the genie of the
state's authority to identify persons and authorize their movements is
out of the bottle, it is hard to get him back in. And, from long years of
experience under the ancien regime, most of the French took for granted
that that genie was loose on the world; perhaps, many of them must have
thought, it had always been so. Gradually, however, a distinction would
emerge between identification documents as such and passports autho-
rizing travel, opening up the possibility for states to eliminate the latter
without giving up their essential capacity to "embrace" individuals by
means of documentary identification practices.

Those opposed to the resurrection of passport controls took a sharply
different view of the probable consequences of their restoration. Far
from regarding the reintroduction of passport controls as a small price to
pay for defending the revolution's larger gains, these critics saw the res-
urrection of social control techniques characteristic of the ancien regimeas
a reversal of the newfound freedom that the revolution had inaugurated,
and therefore as likely to undermine popular support for the revolution-
ary project. This view was expressed by Stanislas Girardin of the
departement of the Oise (north of Paris), a one-time pupil of Rousseau
who moved from left to right in the course of the revolution. One of the
most stirring and impassioned critics of the new passport law, Girardin
besought his fellow deputies not to adopt such an "inquisitorial" law:

A nation that claims to have a constitution cannot enchain the liberty of its
citizens to the extent that you propose. A revolution that commenced with
the destruction of passports must insure a sufficient measure of freedom
to travel, even in times of crisis.

Certainly not all would agree with Girardin 's characterization of the
revolution's origins, but his statement suggests the significance that

35

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

many of the deputies attributed to the passport question and its implica-
tions for the fate of the revolution. The royalist Vienot-Vaublanc of the
neighboring departement of Seine-et-Marne supported Girardin's motion
to delay consideration of the "inquisitorial" law's individual articles until
after the impending weekend, provoking cries from the gallery when
he suggested that overhasty decisions might make of France "a convent
in which liberty is recognized in name only." 58 Vienot-Vaublanc may
have been extraordinarily prescient in his opposition to the renewal of
passport controls; after the revolution of 10 August 1792, he was forced
to go underground and to traverse France on foot. 59

A DETAILED EXAMINATION OF THE NEW PASSPORT LAW

When the Assembly reconvened on Monday, 27 January, the matter of
the passport law was their central preoccupation; 60 a vigorous debate
then unfolded that lasted for the next three days. The Breton Codet
began the discussion by defending the restrictions anew as a small sacri-
fice of liberty in favor of the defense of the larger liberty that, in his view,
the revolution had wrought. He went on to remind the Assembly that
the laws would, in any case, only affect the minority of the population
that actually moved about. Codet asserted that the vast majority of those
who traveled were honest people who, without passports, had no way of
demonstrating that they were such, nor of being certain that the people
they met on the roads would be well-disposed toward them. In short,
according to Codet, only the tiny minority of gens suspects and gens malin-
tentionnes could possibly be opposed to passport requirements for travel.

To this defense of the passport requirements, a deputy named
Lemontey retorted that giving in to the demands of those departements
that were demanding the reinstitution of the passport would result in
disaster. It was true, he conceded, that there were foreigners with strong
antipathies toward the revolution, and he had no objection in principle
to keeping them under surveillance. Lemontey insisted that he was not
far from supporting the passport restrictions, but only if the controls
"leave nothing to arbitrariness" and would not "defame us in the eyes of
Europe": "[T]he law that has been proposed is a symptom of weakness,
of distrust, of internal sickness . . . What foreign power would desire the
friendship of a government wracked with civil division and sacrificing its
principles to its needs and its passions?" Lemontey objected to what he
felt was the limitless, arbitrary power - "a permanent tyranny," he called
it - that was being handed over to the municipal authorities. Like
Girardin before him, Lemontey feared that a move such as this on the
part of the revolutionary leadership would only "augment the number
of malcontents. The welfare of the state is in this word: Make them love

36

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

the Constitution; it is imperishable." Lemontey concluded by arguing
that the law would stimulate massive emigration from France on the part
of those "weak and fearful" persons who remain only because they
assume they can leave if the situation becomes unbearable for them.
There was an element of sophistry in this argument, of course, but the
opponents of the passport law sensed that they were on the defensive.

Another deputy advanced a rather more creative response to the
proposed law by turning its attack on vagabondage and brigandage into
a justification for land redistribution: would it not be possible, he
wondered, to give the itinerant indigent some of the lands lying fallow
that were now in the possession of the nation as a result of the extensive
confiscations of estates and Church lands? The landless poor would then
have work and sustenance, and hence no reason for taking to the roads
as they normally did in times of need. This member was not opposed in
principle to restricting the movements of foreigners and enemies of the
revolution, however; far from it. Indeed, he proposed that foreigners
traveling in France be required to make a declaration to the municipal
authorities wherever they found themselves, and urged that the machin-
ery be set in motion to deport recidivists who were gens sans aveu, gens
suspects, or gens malintentionnes: "This is the only means to purge our
political body of that scum that causes fevered and convulsive move-
ments throughout the country."

In response, Le Coz, the bishop from Ille-et-Vilaine, returned to the
podium to mount a spirited defense of the need for the passport restric-
tions. Le Coz's remarks betrayed the classic illiberal assumption,
embodied for example in many of today's drug-testing proposals, that
anyone who refused to cooperate with the authorities in these procedures
was guilty - of something. Bishop Le Coz went on to advance the inge-
nious argument that the law "would establish among our departements a
chain of relationships and of surveillance that would be as favorable to the
well-meaning man as it would be terrible to the scoundrel." In other
words, such requirements would facilitate the administrative unification
and domination of the country. Passport controls, moreover, would allow
the national gendarmerie to ask "the unknown traveler, in the name of
the law, 'Who are you?'" The fundamental point here, as Gerard Noiriel
has pointed out, is that "written documents [are] the quintessential
instrument of communication at a distance," 61 and such means were
necessary aspects of the development of a unified state before which all
individuals stood equal, irrespective of where they came from.

In concluding his enthusiastic endorsement of the proposed passport
law, Le Coz wondered aloud: "Had passports been required all along, how
much less would we now have to bemoan the maneuvers of the aristocracy,
the poisons of fanaticism, the crimes of the counter-revolutionaries?"

37

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

Even allowing for the much-inflated rhetoric routinely adopted by the
revolutionaries in the parliamentary discussions, the adversaries in the
debate over passport controls spoke as if the very fate of the revolution
hung on the outcome of the passport question.

Once Le Coz had finished his remarks, the Assembly moved to an
article-by-article consideration of the Bill submitted by the Committee
on Legislation. Girardin, the implacable critic of passport restrictions,
immediately went on the attack. He recognized that the horse was
already out of the barn, and that the best he could do at this point was to
seek to control the damage he believed the law would cause. In particu-
lar, Girardin worried that "inquisitorial laws are always advantageous to
the executive power." He therefore proposed an amendment to the first
article, which enunciated the basic requirement that travelers be in
possession of a passport, that would limit the validity of the law to one
year. If the law were not explicidy limited in time, he feared, "you run
the risk of not being able to revoke it." His pleas fell on deaf ears,
however; Girardin's amendment was rejected, and the Assembly moved
on to deliberate on article 2.

The proposed article 2 would have required all passports to include
the name, age, profession, description, domicile, and nationality of the
bearer. The issue of the bearer's description provoked opposition to this
part of the law. We have seen that the passport restrictions adopted in
mid-1791 in response to Louis XVTs flight to Varennes had included a
description of those traveling on the document's authority in order to
forestall any disguised departures such as that of the King. Until that
time, it had been thought adequate to identify people mainly in terms of
their social station, geographic origins, and the like. Yet now the objec-
tion was raised that requiring descriptions in a passport would result in
the arbitrary infringement of travelers' freedom because the various
agents of the state involved in enforcing these controls were "inade-
quately informed" and might "not be able to distinguish exactly among
descriptions." Half a century later, photographs would come into use in
passport documents precisely in order to overcome this sort of objection
- although photographs themselves would at first encounter the same
objection from police officials who doubted their reliability. 62

The doctor, naturalist, and Girondin sympathizer Broussonet coun-
tered with the proposal that the standard passport format be attached to
the law as adopted, thereby leaving no ambiguity about the information
each passport was to contain. "There isn't a municipal administration in
the Kingdom," he insisted, "that is not in a position to distinguish
between color of hair, of eyes . . ." Broussonet went on to make a crucial
addition to the criteria for granting passports: henceforth, they should
all be issued to individuals. Part of the reason the King had been able to

38

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

get as far as Varennes, of course, was that he was traveling - undescribed
- as a servant in a passport issued to someone else (the Baroness de
Korff). The practice of issuing passports for groups of persons had,
according to Broussonet, "given complete liberty to bad subjects." The
Legislative Assembly found his arguments persuasive and adopted the
version of the amendment that he had proposed, with the sole revision
that passports were to be handed out exclusively by the municipal
authorities. This change had been urged by Delacroix, who insisted that
this power be removed from the hands of the ministers who, in his view,
were issuing the passports with which the emigres were slipping off to
Coblenz to join the enemies of the revolution.

The law's article 3 proposed that, in addition to the information
required by article 2, each passport was to include a copy (extrait) of the
declaration made before the municipal authorities in accordance with
the aforementioned law on municipal police of 19 July 1791. 63 To this
clause the objection was raised that the whole business would be super-
fluous and circular; "if a citizen is the bearer of a certificate that contains
his age, his position (qualite), etc., it is perfectly useless for him to pre-
sent a copy of the municipal declaration, for it is only on the basis of a
copy of that declaration that the municipal authorities would give him a
passport in the first place. This would unnecessarily burden the munici-
pal officials." The Jacobin Jacques Alexis Thuriot, a member of the party
that had stormed the Bastille in 1789 who became distinguished for his
efforts to stymie the counterrevolution, 64 grasped the essential point -
which was precisely the circular integration of these documents, their
correspondence as state-sponsored verifications of identity - and
demanded that the requirement be included in the final version of the
law. Yet objections concerning the feasibility of implementing this provi-
sion led the Assembly to drop it.

Article 4 would have forbidden the municipal authorities to issue
passports to those registered by their respective municipalities as gens
sans aveu, gens suspects, or gens malintentionees without express mention of
these designations in the passport. This proviso was clearly outrageous,
and inevitably calls to mind Peuchet's insistence that the burden of the
passport requirements fell most heavily on the "poor and obscure" ele-
ments of the population. The proposed amendment provoked
immediate and indignant objections from several members including
Vergniaud, the Girondins' "best orator", 65 who regarded it as "infinitely
immoral and unworthy of the Assembly to allow the municipal authori-
ties to inscribe defamatory remarks in the passports." Vergniaud went on
to observe that this sort of defamation, often rooted in a malevolence
and a desire to slander rather than in any legitimate motive, would have
"a legal character, because it is certified by the municipal authorities."

39

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

Whereas the requirement that persons state their profession in passports
was, as Paul Fussell has written in another context, an "open invitation to
self-casting and social promotion, not to mention outright fraud," 66 the
bureaucratic codification of social marginality held grave dangers for
those subjected to it. The Legislative Assembly recognized this proposal
as the arbitrary constraint on the liberty of the poor that it was, and
eliminated it from the law.

The proposed Article 6 would have allowed all French passport bear-
ers to move about unhindered only within the district in which they
resided. Yet upon departure from the district they would have been
required to have their passports visaed by the directory of the district or
departement in which their municipality was situated. To this measure
Delacroix replied simply that "it would dishonor the Assembly to pro-
pose such an article for its deliberation," and the matter was disposed of.
The version of the law that was actually adopted required that those
departing from the Kingdom- French or foreign - indicate this intention
to the municipal authorities in their place of residence, and that this act
be mentioned in their passports. 67 The law thus harmonized with the
overall trend toward the replacement of local by national boundaries
and the "nationalization" of French political space.

Next, the Committee on Legislation proposed to require that all
foreigners who wished to depart the Kingdom be in possession of a
passport and, in addition, that it be visaed by the directory of the district
or frontier departement from which the traveler in question intended to
leave. Girardin and others objected that such a clause would frequently
force people already at the border to return to the interior to get the
necessary visa and would generally cause considerable inconvenience,
and proposed instead that the visa authority be given to municipal
authorities. The moderate Louis Becquey suggested that this article
(and the next) should be rejected because "our intention is to prevent
internal troubles and to guarantee individual security and general lib-
erty," not to constrain emigration. Another member observed that
French travelers in Spain were experiencing difficulties because the
authorities there were refusing to recognize passports issued by the
municipalities, and hence insisted that all passports be visaed by higher
authorities ( les gouverneurs) .

Thuriot, an outspoken enthusiast of passport controls, argued that
the Assembly needed to be in a position to know when people had left
France in order to be able to determine which of them wanted to join up
with the emigres. In effect, he said, the legislators wanted to have dis-
tinct passports for the interior and for exit, and thus proposed to
require those wishing to depart to take a passport in which that aim was
to be duly indicated. This proposal met with the objection that people

40

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

might decide that it was necessary to leave the country while already
away from their domicile in France, forcing them to return home before
departing simply to get proper authorization. Backing Thuriot's pro-
posal, Vergniaud noted that the essential point was to be able to
distinguish between those who wanted "to leave the realm" and those
who wanted "to abandon the patrie" - that is, the purpose of these
measures was not to restrict emigration, but to be able to make ideolog-
ical distinctions among those leaving.

One member, raising the "who will guard the guards" question, said
he would support Thuriot's proposal only if it also regulated the behav-
ior of the frontier municipalities charged with checking whether those
leaving the country were going where they had said they would.
Otherwise, he insisted, these departees might be on their way to join the
enemy forces at Coblenz after dissembling about their motives when
they originally received their passports. A number of legislators shouted
that such a provision was unacceptable, for, as Becquey put it, "you have
no right" to determine where people shall go. While it may be difficult
for states to control movement outside their own borders, this has
scarcely kept them from trying to implement such controls, and they
may be able to do so effectively mainly because of their capacity to
distribute rewards and punishments at home when the traveler returns.

By now the Assembly was churning with controversy, and a proposal
to adopt Thuriot's amendment by acclamation drove the house wild.
Pandemonium had erupted in the chamber in response to his proposal
to require those wishing to leave the Kingdom to carry a passport in
which that intention was inscribed. One legislator insisted on a roll-call
vote, calling the provision "bloodthirsty"; another denounced it as
"destructive of commerce and industry, and contrary to the interests of
the people." That steadfast opponent of passport controls, Girardin,
returned to the attack, demanding that the Assembly "not be permitted
to destroy commerce and freedom without discussion . . ," 68

Thuriot declared himself astonished that those who had defended
the revolution from its very outset could regard as "bloodthirsty" a mea-
sure intended "to save the public good," but he revised his proposal to
the effect that passports would be issued by the municipal authorities in
the recipients' place of residence, and that mention would be made
therein of their intention to depart. It was this version that was ulti-
mately adopted as article 5 of the passport law of 1 February - 28 March
1792. After some further minor sparring about the inconveniences asso-
ciated with the passport regulations, the Assembly adjourned. A
tumultuous day's debate over the particulars of the new passport
controls thus came to an end. Two more similarly rancorous days of
discussion would follow before the final result was obtained.

41

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

In the end, under the influence of the siege mentality invoked by
numerous speakers during the debate, the Assembly reversed a decision
it had excitedly and unhesitatingly taken only a few months before. The
atmosphere in which the Assembly adopted this course could hardly be
better indicated than by Thuriot's remarks on 30 January 1792, which
were met with exuberant applause: "At this moment, we cannot deceive
ourselves: there are conspiracies of every kind against us, and we cannot
be too vigilant." The forces favoring the restoration of controls - mostly
from the revolutionary left - won out, and passport restrictions were
reintroduced. Declaring that "the health of the Empire requires the
most active surveillance," the National Assembly mandated that every-
one - whether French or foreign - traveling within the Kingdom be in
possession of a passport. Those wishing to leave French territory had to
have a notation to this effect inserted into their passports by the author-
ities in their place of residence; those entering the Kingdom, if they did
not already have one, were to take a passport from the authorities in the
municipality where they crossed the border. 69 Surveillance had, indeed,
become the order of the day.

By the summer, with war against Prussia and Austria heating up and the
problem of emigration persisting, the Assembly on 28-9 July adopted a
further "Decree on Passports" entirely suspending the issuance of such
documents for departure from France, except to certain selected groups
distinguished mainly by their need to travel abroad for commercial pur-
poses. 70 Movement within France was once again heavily restricted and
departure from the country made illegal for almost everyone.

In adopting these measures, the Assembly had taken a new departure
as well. By subjecting foreigners as well as French citizens to these pass-
port requirements, the new restrictions on movement were part of an
important shift in the legal status of foreigners in European states. Under
mercantilism, the foreigner, although otherwise treated like the subject
in legal terms, typically enjoyed greater freedom to emigrate than native-
born subjects. 71 Now, foreigners were increasingly being exposed to the
same disabilities as Frenchmen with respect to departure from France.
Moreover, they tended to be seen as a threat to the patrie, as would grad-
ually come to be expected in any international conflict. Several
protagonists in the early 1792 Assembly debate over passport controls
had insisted that, notwithstanding their birth elsewhere, many foreigners
were "true friends of liberty" and should therefore not be encumbered
with extraordinary legal burdens. Their views failed to carry the day. The
foreigner, increasingly defined exclusively in national rather than local
terms, was perceived more and more ipso facto as a suspect.

The passport restrictions on movement voted by the Assembly in
early 1792 held sway for a number of months as France faced intensified

42

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

hostility from within and without. Toward the end of the year, however,
the deputies came around to the view that the restrictions on movement
within France, at least, were proving counterproductive. In response to
claims that the provisioning of Paris was suffering greatly under the
restraints on "the circulation of goods and people," the Assembly in
early September adopted a decree reestablishing "free circulation" and
abolishing the clauses of the law of 1 February - 28 March 1 792 requir-
ing a passport, except within ten lieues from the borders or from
enemy-occupied territory. 72 This was a remarkable turnabout, coming as
it did only a few days after the fall of Verdun and the declaration draped
across the facade of the Hotel de Ville in Paris that "the patrie is in
danger." Yet less than two weeks later, the Assembly bolstered these pro-
visions by decreeing that those found guilty of hindering the movements
of persons or goods would themselves be subject to detention for a
period equivalent to the duration of such hindrance. 73

The tendency to equate "goods and people" when discussing the
question of free movement was a striking aspect of the parliament's
deliberations at this point. The proclivity appears to have been of older
provenance, 74 deriving perhaps from a time when many of those travel-
ing the roads of the country were subject to one form or another of
unfree labor, and thus seen as little more than property capable of mov-
ing itself. Whatever its origins, the habit of viewing freedom of
movement as contributing to both liberty and prosperity is a recurrent
motif in subsequent discussions of passport restrictions, and a figure of
thought that gathered strength with the rising prospects of economic
liberalism in nineteenth-century Europe.

Despite the Assembly's decisive steps to guarantee free circulation when
it adopted the new constitution in September 1791, those involved in
constructing the new regime in France recognized that they had to be in a
position to "embrace" the subjects of the state when the need to do so
arose. Accordingly, it was necessary for the state to be in control of birth
registries that until then had been in the hands of the parish priest.
Because the Catholic Church was principally concerned to tend to its own
flock, however, the church registers frequently ignored the births of Jews,
Protestants, and others. This simply would not do for modern states, which
- unlike the Church - are territorial and membership organizations that
must thus be able to distinguish between members and non-members,
those with rights of access to the territory and those lacking them.

On 20 September 1792, the government therefore decreed the estab-
lishment of civil status (I'etat civil), a title denoting "standing" within a
constituted political order. "From that moment on," Gerard Noiriel has
written, "an individual could only exist as a citizen once his or her iden-
tity had been registered by the municipal authorities, according to

43

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

regulations that were the same throughout the national territory." 75 In
doing so, the French state enhanced its capacity to "embrace" its citizens
and to keep track of them in order to achieve its aims. On the same day,
ironically, Goethe famously declared that "this date and place mark a
new epoch in world history" 76 after the bedraggled French "nation in
arms" defeated vastly better-trained Prussian troops in the battle at
Valmy. Enthusiasm for the nation and its definition by the state would
mutually characterize that new epoch of which Goethe spoke.

PASSPORTS AND FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT UNDER THE CONVENTION

The legal fortunes of the freedom of movement and the extent to which
travelers were encumbered by passport requirements rose and fell in
response to the decrees of the revolutionary Convention, which looked
for, and found, enemies everywhere. In late October 1 792, the Conven-
tion banished the emigres from French territory "in perpetuity" and
declared the death penalty for those who contravened the law. 77 Shortly
thereafter, the emigres then on French territory were directed to leave
the country. 78 The lot of the emigres, irrespective of why they had left
France, had taken a decided turn for the worse.

Yet the picture was far from monochromatic. In late November, the
Convention had suspended the delivery of certificates of residence, only
to adopt a few days later a decree rescinding this suspension for mer-
chants and their agents who found it necessary to travel "for their
commercial affairs," and authorizing the issuance of certificates and
passports to them. 79 Then, on 7 December 1792, the Conventionnels
adopted a measure that softened the restrictions of the passport law of
the previous July by allowing the distribution of passports to those wish-
ing to leave the Kingdom for "their interests or their affairs." The
legislation was cautious, however, in requiring would-be travelers to
obtain a passport from the directory of the departement in which they
lived; the directory, in turn, was to rely on the judgment of the district
and municipal authorities in deciding whether the request for a pass-
port was "legitimate and sufficiendy verified," and to issue the passports
only under these conditions. 80

The purpose of these restrictions on access to passports for depar-
ture, according to the law's proponent, was "to stymie the culpable
maneuvers of the ill-intentioned, and to keep at their posts those citizens
who want to permit themselves too easily to leave French territory at a
time when the patrie may have need of their presence." 81 In short, the
French state needed to be able to lay hold of miscreants, and to keep
hold of its potential allies who might be overcome with Wanderlust at a
time that the state regards as inconvenient. Later emendations of

44

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

passport requirements would frequently recur to this law as the touch-
stone from which they took their cue.

Soon, however, this relative laxity would become unacceptable to
those at the helm of the Convention, who sought to gain firmer control
of affairs. Their utter seriousness became unmistakably apparent when
they voted to have the King beheaded in the Place de la Revolution on
21 January 1793. Shortly thereafter, in its justification of a new, standard
passport form for seamen, the Convention voiced its distress about the
administrative chaos it confronted: "It is a matter of the dignity of the
French Republic to establish a uniform procedure in its government,
and to abrogate this monstrous melange of disparate forms."
Henceforth, valid seamen's documents were to be made recognizable by
bearing the superscription "Liberte, Egalite." 82

In February, moreover, the pages of Le Moniteur indicate that a specifi-
cally revolutionary form of documentation, the so-called certificats de
civisme, had begun to proliferate uncontrollably, and efforts were made to
stem their availability. First introduced on 1 November 1792, the certificats
de civisme had been made a requirement for all government functionaries
with a law of 5 February 1793, and by June they were obligatory for all
pensionnaires de la Republique. Such certificates could be denied to persons
revealing a liking for foreigners or foreign customs. As attestations of rev-
olutionary sentiment with significant advantages to those holding them,
the distribution of certificates de civisme could be used as a way to terrorize
those who did not have them. They were thus very valuable documents
that people were prepared to lie about in order to get. 83

Against this background, calls for the reinvigoration of passport con-
trols were once again heard in the Convention. A member from the
brigand-infested Breton departement of Morbihan complained that the
patrie was beset by enemies because of the lack of enforcement of the
passport laws and demanded that they be "severely executed." That reli-
able supporter of passport restrictions, Thuriot, reminded the assembly
that the passport law was on the books, but had been neglected during
the preceding months. "But the only measure," he insisted, "that can
force the volunteers to remain under the colors, and to prevent the
actions of the malevolents, trouble-makers, and thieves is to put the law
back in effect." Thuriot pressed for the renewed implementation of the
laws of 28 March and 28 July 1 792, to which it was replied that this would
be acceptable only if the law of 7 December was not "derogated." 84

Claiming that it was of "the greatest importance" that the "constituted
authorities" be in a position "to know, to arrest, and to punish the
malcontents that circulate in different parts of the Republic inciting the
violation of the laws, and to prevent as much as possible all criminal
intelligence with the external enemy," the Convention declared on

45

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

26 February 1793 that this trio of laws was to be implemented until
otherwise ordered. 85 Two days later, the Convention seems to have felt
that it had not written a sufficiently stringent regulation. As a result, it
decreed that all French citizens away from their domiciles and not in
possession of a passport issued more recently than August 1792 were to
appear before the municipality where they currently resided within
twenty-four hours after the promulgation of the decree to report "their
description, and to give their name, age, occupation, and domicile." 86
This measure was designed to contend with the problem of issuing doc-
uments to those away from their municipality of domicile, the authority
empowered by the law of 28 March 1792 to issue passports.

Six weeks later, in a decree primarily devoted to assuring the repre-
sentatives of accredited foreign powers that they would be able to gain
access to passports, the Convention "suppressed the usage of the iaissez
passer established by the city of Paris for exit from the barricades." 87
Clearly, in this chaotic period, the central government had no effective
monopoly on the legitimate authority to control movement. Moreover,
although the Convention demonstrated a charming faith in the efficacy
of its pronouncements, it seems improbable that its regulations were
implemented with any strict uniformity.

In fact, the Convention was losing its grip on the country, which in
any case was not especially powerful in the first place. In early March,
the counterrevolutionaries of the Vendee rose again, this time en masse,
and lit a torch that ignited other parts of the region. During the ensuing
weeks, General Dumouriez concluded an armistice with the Austrians
with the intention of marching on Paris to restore the monarchy and the
Constitution of 1791; the death penalty was invoked against armed
rebels, refractory priests, and emigres; and, by the end of the month, the
latter had died "civil death" and were subject to the physical variety if
they returned to the country. 88

During this period, control over administration of the repression
increasingly slipped from the Convention's grasp. In particular, with the
creation of the watch committees (comites de surveillance) on 21 March
regulation of movement and enforcement of passport regulations fell
more and more into the hands of rogue, sans-culotte elements. 89 Worse
still, the rebels of the Vendee were issuing their own passports; in June,
the Convention adopted a decree punishing with ten years' deprivation
of the rights of citizenship those soldiers who, having been captured by
the Vendeans, accepted a passport from them in order to return to the
Republican ranks. 90 On 28 Frimaire Year II (18 December 1793), the
Convention would nullify all passports issued by the municipalities situ-
ated in the areas where the "fugitive brigands of the Vendee" circulated
- presumably because the Vendeans were getting access to legitimate

46

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

passports as a result of the connivance of local officials sympathetic to
them. 91 The paranoia of the Convention was growing, and would
continue to do so until it issued in the draconian "Law on Suspects" of
September 1 793, which made the watch committees "all-powerful" and
defined as suspects - among many other groups - those who had ever
been denied a certificat de civisme. 92 In an effort to impose greater order
on the administration of passport controls, at least, the Conseil general
endorsed a Parisian measure to bureaucratize the distribution of docu-
ments, providing that the commissions on passports, certificates of
residence, and certificats de civisme should consist of four members each
who should receive an indemnity of 2000 livres for their efforts. 93

Those from other countries suffered special antipathy during this
period. On 18 March 1793 Barere, soon to be a member of the Committee
of Public Safety, instigated a law that "chased" foreigners from the territory
of the Republic. Exceptions were to be made only if the individual in ques-
tion had made a declaration to the newly installed twelve-member
committees instituted in each municipality to hear them. If they passed
this examination, they were issued residence certificates; otherwise, they
were to leave the country within twenty-four hours or eight days, depend-
ing on circumstances. With this law, "all foreigners are henceforth accused
of being political enemies of the revolution." 94 Because it is impossible to
identify a foreigner merely by sight, some means must be created to do so;
it seems that at least some of those who passed the "examen de civisme"
were required to wear armbands inscribed with the word "hospitality" and
the name of their country of origin. 95 The watch committees assumed a
special role in safeguarding France against "strangers," whether internal
or "foreign" in our contemporary sense. 96

Yet it should not necessarily be supposed that the regulation of
"strangers" was the sole or even primary activity of the watch commit-
tees. Their mandate encompassed a wide array of suspects and their
authority expanded with the drift toward unconstrained terror. On 24
February 1 793 the Convention had embarked upon a levy of 300 000
men to be drawn from among bachelors and widowers between the ages
of twenty and forty. 97 Enthusiasm for military service remained a spotty
affair, however, and considerable energy had to be spent in tracking
down the unwilling. As a result, "much of the time and effort of comites de
surveillance was taken up in 1793-94 with tracking down deserters to
their village, forest, or mountain hide-outs . . ." 98

Recruitment problems multiplied with the Convention's declaration
of the levee en masse in August 1793; Lefebvre concludes that, of those
newly liable for service who absconded, "most of them certainly
escaped." 99 Some of them may have been using public and postal vehi-
cles to do so, for the Conseil general issued an order in early 1794

47

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

prohibiting such conveyances from taking on anyone not in possession
of a passport visaed by the municipality and the revolutionary commit-
tees. 100 By early June 1794, the Great Terror of the Year II was in full
swing, and with it the grim work of the guillotines.

With the fall of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety after
the Thermidorian reaction (28 July 1794), a sense of relief was palpable
in France. This mood extended to passport matters as well. At the same
time that the watch committees were eviscerated, the Convention moved
to liberalize documentary restrictions on travel. On 6 Fructidor Year II
(23 August 1794), the Convention decreed that passports in the depart-
ment of Paris would be issued by the comite civil without any longer
having to be referred to the general assembly of the section, and would
be visaed by the revolutionary committee of the arrondissement. The
requirement that passports be visaed by the departement was abolished as
well. In addition, the passports of French travelers arriving in Paris were
to be visaed exclusively by the comite civiL m By failing to specify whether
this decree concerned both internal passports and passports for m"<from
the country, however, the measure aroused considerable confusion in
the ranks of those responsible for administering these laws. This ambi-
guity was exacerbated by the fact that the Thermidorians held the
municipality of Paris to have been engaged in a conspiratorial undertak-
ing during the Terror, and would soon move to suppress that body. 102

In late September 1794, the Convention's Committee on Legislation
proposed a clarification of the terms of the 23 August decree. The com-
mittee's spokesman began by noting that the law of 7 December 1792
had not yet been abrogated; that law, it will be recalled, required that the
departements were to issue passports for departure, after hearing the
advice of the district and municipal directories concerning the legiti-
macy of the request. While this procedure had (supposedly) been
followed in every other departement in the Republic, "it is clear that the
law cannot have applied in Paris, where a conspiratorial municipality has
been justly struck down by the national sovereignty that it sought to
usurp." 103 Once again, the central state found it necessary to assert its
supremacy in the matter of authorizing legitimate movement against
elements seeking to claim this authority for themselves.

The spokesman then announced that the legislative committee's
reading of the law of 6 Fructidor Year II led it to conclude that the
Convention had not, in fact, wished to change the requirements for exter-
nal passports that had been dictated by the law of 7 December 1792.
Thereupon the Convention adopted a decree affirming this interpreta-
tion, and reiterated the responsibility of the departement of Paris for issuing
passports - with the emendation that they should rely on the advice of the
civil and revolutionary committees rather than on that of the municipality

48

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

in determining the acceptability of a passport request. 104 In the process,
and quite coincidentally, the revolutionary Convention took an important
step toward distinguishing bureaucratically between internal and external
passports: the one to be issued by local authorities, the other by higher-
level - though not yet "national" - authorities.

The niceties of bureaucratic rationalization aside, however, much of
this preoccupation with the details of passport procedure was, as a prac-
tical matter, little more than eyewash. For the central government in
Paris was a paper tiger with scarcely any effective control in the country-
side, over which were scattered all manner of brigands, dismissed
officials, 106 deserting soldiers, and returning emigres, significant seg-
ments of whom were in rebellion. The steady stream of decrees and the
frequency with which passport matters appear on the agenda of the
Convention themselves point to this conclusion.

In fact, the passport laws were openly flouted and indeed mocked, as
can be seen in the case of the emigres, who began a major reflux after
Thermidor despite the persistence of penal legislation against them.
Some had availed themselves of forged papers to facilitate their return,
and saw easily enough the usefulness of such documents for their
confreres (and perhaps a much-needed source of income for them-
selves). As the numbers of former emigres in France swelled, they
established agencies in various cities dedicated to producing evidence of
non-emigration, which was essential for their ability to evade hostile
authorities. These counterfeits included hospital receipts, certificates of
residence, and passports; quantity production of the latter "soon
brought the price down to ten francs each and made them available to
almost anyone." 106 It is axiomatic that fraud and forgery are more or less
automatic responses to the imposition by states of documentary require-
ments of this kind.

Against this backdrop, it could hardly be surprising that one of the
deputies harangued the Convention on 1 May 1795, with the charge that
"the law on passports has not been implemented," as a result of which "the
scum of the Republic seeks refuge here [in Paris] , and we are surrounded
by assassins." 107 By the end of the same month, and for the first time since
1789, troops would enter Paris to fight the rebellious citizenry of the city.
When the Faubourg-St. Antoine surrendered without a struggle, the
revolution - at least by Georges Lefebvre's reckoning - was over. 108

A brief relaxation of documentary controls followed. First, the
Committee of General Security endorsed the Parisian authorities'
issuance of passports to disarmed citizens (citoyens desarmes) in order to
facilitate "commerce" and "communication." 109 A month later, the gov-
ernment abolished the certificats de civisme, a measure heartily applauded
as a contribution to the restoration of freedom. 110 The French would no

49

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

longer require this documentary attestation of their adherence to the rev-
olutionary cause, and even those who had taken up arms against the
revolution would once again be free to move about to tend to their affairs.

The foreign-born did not get off so easily, however. In between these
two measures, the Convention - at the advice of the Committees of
Public Safety and General Security - banished from France all foreigners
who had entered the country after 1 January 1792. The route which
they intended to take on their departure from the country was to
be recorded in the passports they would require to leave France.
Conversely, upon arrival at the French border, foreigners were to
deposit their passports with the municipal authorities, who were to send
them on to the Committee of General Security to be visaed. In place of
their passports, the municipal authorities were to give these individuals a
provisional carte de surete indicating that they were to remain under
surveillance while the passport was being checked out. Meanwhile,
those foreigners who were permitted to remain - chiefly those from
friendly or allied countries, those who had entered France prior to 1792,
and those recognized for "their patriotism and their probity" - were to
receive an identity card bearing their description. At the top of the cards
were to appear the words hospitalite et surete and, if the person were from
a country with which France was at peace, the word "fraternite . . ." m

While clearly analogous to the previously discussed practice of requir-
ing foreigners to wear armbands, this may have been the first time that
foreigners in France were to be compelled to carry a document attesting
their foreignness but unrelated to movement control (i.e., an "identity
card" rather than a passport). Only those from countries with which
France was not at war received the inscription "fraternite" on their cards,
suggesting the authorities' merely provisional attitude toward the
"surete" of those originally from other countries. The regulation in any
case bore witness to the undeniable fact that there is no way to identify a
foreigner without some form of marking such as these cards. France had
begun to take the necessary steps to distinguish clearly and effectively
between natives and foreigners within its borders.

Shortly after the adoption of the Constitution of the Year HI on 1
Vendemiaire Year IV (23 September 1795), the Convention once again
tightened the screws on the movements of the French citizenry. In its
"Decree on the Internal Communal Police," the government ordered that
henceforth persons would be not permitted to leave the area of their can-
ton without a passport signed by the administration of the municipality or
of the canton itself. In the interest of bureaucratic consistency, each
department was to supply the lower authorities with a model of the pass-
port to be used. Those found outside their cantons without the required
document and unable to establish satisfactorily the location of their

50

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

domicile were to be treated as vagabonds, who might receive fairly harsh
punishments including up to a year of detention - followed, in extreme
cases, by "transportation," presumably to a French penal colony. 112

If the government had had the teeth to make this measure bite, it
would have turned France into a gigantic prison in which the cantons
constituted the individual cells. As we have seen, however, the likelihood
is that it would have been relatively easy to circumvent these require-
ments. Still, the decree bespoke a vindictive mood, especially against
the poor. Indeed, these regulations reinvigorated a law from two years
earlier that had been specifically directed toward the control of
mendicity. 113 Having moved decisively to sharpen documentary restric-
tions on potential enemy foreigners, the Thermidorian Convention
rejuvenated strictures against the lower orders that strongly resembled
those of the ancien regime, and that the Constituent Assembly had
proudly eliminated less than four years earlier. The revolution thus with-
drew firmly from the prospect of untrammeled freedom of movement
that had been heralded in the work of the Constituent Assembly.

PASSPORT CONCERNS OF THE DIRECTORY

Just as the Convention was adopting this most recent restrictive legisla-
tion, Napoleon was crushing the Parisian revolt of Vendemiaire Year IV.
The Directory followed immediately on his heels. Despite the fact that it
took a harder line against footloose elements, it, too, was unable to gain
mastery over the country. The fact that the Directory felt it necessary to
reiterate in late March 1796 the prohibition on passport-less departures
from a canton enunciated the previous October suggests that the actual
implementation of those restrictions left much to be desired. 114

During this period, desertion from the army remained a major prob-
lem, and one that the government seems to have been largely helpless to
curtail. Richard Cobb has offered a pungent description of the situation
facing the government:

[In the Year IV] we hear of a whole company of soldiers, in uniform, with
their regimental numbers on their collars, walking from Sarrelouis [in
Alsace], the length of a half-dozen Departments . . . without at any stage
being challenged . . . The enormous extension of desertion in the year IV
and the year V - probably the peak - is the most striking testimony to the
powerlessness of the Directory almost anywhere outside Paris . . . There is
something splendid about defiance of government on such an impudent
scale . . . 115

This impudence may have seemed splendid to one of its most brilliant
historians, but it most assuredly did not warm the hearts of those run-
ning the Directory.

51

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

Perhaps as a result of its ineffectuality in governing movement within
France, the drift of legislation under the First Directory was toward a
more exclusive preoccupation with passport controls on those leaving
and entering France. At least at first, the Directory held to the 7
December 1792 law concerning passports for departure from the coun-
try. In March 1 796, however, the Directory took up a proposal to change
that law to make it conform to the fact that the district directories -
formerly responsible, along with the municipalities, for giving their
recommendation to the departements with respect to the legitimacy of
requests for passports for departure from France - had since been sup-
pressed. According to the bill's preamble, it was also designed to
"extend and activate the surveillance of the government over the acqui-
sition of passports" for departure. It was to achieve the latter objective by
requiring that the departmental administrations submit every ten days
(the decade of the new revolutionary calendar) a list of the passports they
had issued during the interim. 116

Rising to defend the bill against critics who found it too lax, a speaker
known as a vigorous devotee of the Constitution of 1791 117 waxed elo-
quent about the rights of a people that had lived "for fourteen centuries
under the arbitrary power of kings and their ministers and that is sur-
rounded by nations subject to a power of the same type," about absolute
and relative freedom, and about natural rights and the rights of man
and citizen - especially the right to move about and to leave that was
guaranteed in the constitution. The speaker agreed that the times
demanded sharper surveillance by the government and thus that it was
admissible to require that those wishing to leave first obtain the state's
permission to do so. Yetjust as one inculcates timidity in a child too long
kept in the crib, he insisted, "one robs the French people of a part of its
energy" if one weighs it down too long with unnecessary restrictions.
Ultimately, these views prevailed, and the Council of Ancients - the body
now ruling France - adopted the bill. In view of the fact that both sup-
porters and opponents agreed that this measure would lighten the
burden of documentary requirements on those wishing to leave France,
we may conclude that this outcome was not unwelcome to the leaders of
the Directory. 118

Whereas the government relaxed passport strictures with respect to
French citizens, this period saw a harsh turn against foreigners, who
were increasingly seen by the top officialdom as criminals. The pages of
Le Moniteur from this period record an extraordinary diatribe by the
Montagnard Julien Souhait regarding the need to impose a more severe
passport regime on foreigners. Souhait began his remarks by noting that
the government had required passports for all those leaving their domi-
cile, "as proof of their good conduct and their respect for liberty and

52

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

public tranquility." But if this were reasonable enough for French per-
sons, he continued, there was all the more reason to require passports of
foreigners, "men who cannot offer, like the French, the natural guaran-
tee of their attachment to the patrie, nor the same means to repair the
damage they might do through corruption or immorality." Souhait went
on to decry the favoritism toward potentially dangerous co-nationals dis-
played by foreign ambassadors in the issuance of passports, and insisted
that these foreign emissaries could not be trusted to take French security
concerns into account in their passport practices.

Souhait then delivered himself of a statement that articulated directly
the notion of the state's monopolization of the legitimate means of
movement, as well as the shift toward making French political space a
place "of and for the French":

Passports are a police measure of the government on whose territory
travelers circulate. None other than that government, or its agents, has
the right to bestow them, for none other has the interest and none other
has the right and obligation to watch over good order, liberty, and the
public security. The agent of a foreign power cannot be your agent, even
in his own interest; you cannot give him any authority, even less one that
the constitution expressly delegates exclusively to the French and to the
magistrates of the people. The foreigner, like every resident, is subject to
the laws of the country in which he travels. This subjection is the price of
the protection that he receives; it is the prerogative and the right of the
public authority. A natural-born Frenchman (un naturel) may not travel in
France without the permission of the government or the magistrates of
the people; the foreigner must therefore [also] obtain permission.

One way to get around the problem of foreign undesirables entering the
country with documents issued by foreign rather than French authori-
ties, he suggested, would be to establish a system whereby French
authorities in the traveler's country of origin would issue passports to those
wishing to come to France. Unlike foreigners, French officials could be
relied upon not to distribute passports to those who might be expected
to undermine public order in France. Souhait envisioned, in effect, the
international visa system that would gradually develop over the next cen-
tury and a quarter. His main legislative point was to complain of the
inadequacies of the law of 23 Messidor Year III (11 July 1795) that had
banished from France all but the "patriotic" foreign-born, and to insist
that foreigners circulating in France - whom he accused of instigating
"tumultuous assemblies" and "provoking anarchy and demagogic furor"
in the foregoing weeks - have their passports visaed by French authori-
ties. 119 In all events, one senses in Souhait's remarks a decisive adieu to
the revolutionary cosmopolitanism expressed by Condorcet and others
in the early days of the revolution.

53

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

The xenophobic mood articulated by Souhait was not without issue.
First, just before Christmas 1 796, the Directory stiffened the provisions
of the hostile law of 23 Messidor Year III (11 July 1795), requiring that
the passports of foreigners arriving in France be deposited with frontier
officials and sent on to the Ministry of General Police to be visaed. Now,
in addition, duly certified copies of such passports were to be forwarded
to both the public prosecutor and the Directory's commissioner at
the departmental criminal tribunal. 120 Then, in April, the Directory
declared null and void all passports issued or visaed by diplomatic emis-
saries of the United States. 121 This measure was taken in the atmosphere
that produced the Alien and Sedition Acts, the first law empowering the
American government to deport undesirable foreigners, and suggested
the extraordinary discomfiture with which developments in France were
being regarded abroad, even outside the Continent. 122 The earlier aim
of exporting the revolution to other countries suffering under arbitrary
rule had been transmuted into wars of conquest, and France had
learned enmity of foreigners as it earned enmity from their respective
fatherlands.

But the culmination of these trends was yet to come. With the coup
d'etat of 18 Fructidor Year V (4 September 1797), anti-foreign and revo-
lutionary sentiments welled up afresh as the dictatorship attempted to
clean house of its opponents and enemies. For the French, this meant a
wave of terror - "a reversion to the spirit of '93," Greer called it - against
refractory clergy, emigres, and many who were confused with them in
the ensuing fracas. The "Fructidorian Terror" thus spurred a new stream
of emigration, not least of those members of the Council of 500 purged
and condemned to deportation by the law of 19 Fructidor with which
those who carried out the coup asserted their predominance.' 23 By the
end of September, the Directory moved to consideration of a new pass-
port law intended to give them the upper hand in the midst of all the
confusion. It soon adopted a statute that has been described as "the
starting-point for modern aliens legislation." 124

In fact, the law tightened passport requirements for both French citi-
zens and foreigners. For the former, passports henceforth were to
include mention of the bearer's destination. Within ten days after the
promulgation of the statute, all passports issued prior to the date of pro-
mulgation were declared null and void. Those away from their place of
domicile during that time were to obtain new papers from the adminis-
tration in the canton in which they found themselves; the passports were
to be issued, however, only on the basis of a declaration by two residents
of the relevant canton who were familiar with the applicant. A copy of
such passports was to be sent to the cantonal administration where
the person had his or her domicile. In addition, article 6 pronounced

54

THE PASSPORT QUESTION IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

penalties of one to two years in prison against those officials complicit in
issuing passports for travel within France to those who had been ordered
expelled from France pursuant to the law of 19 Fructidor.

Yet the regulations were even more stringent for those from other
countries. Nonresident foreigners then in France were obliged to pre-
sent their passports to the administration of the departement - a
higher-level authority - in which they happened to be, and the destina-
tion of their travels and their current residence was to be inscribed as for
French citizens. Copies of these passports, however, were to be sent to
the Ministry of Foreign Relations as well as that of the General Police. In
a move presumably directed especially at the English, the surveillance
measures already enjoined in law against those arriving in French ports
were reaffirmed. Finally, article 7 brought the coup de grace: all foreigners
traveling within France, or resident there in any capacity other than that
of an accredited official mission on behalf of a neutral or friendly power,
and who had not acquired French citizenship, were "placed under the
special surveillance of the executive Directory, which may withdraw
their passports and compel their departure from French territory if it
judges their presence susceptible to disturb the public order and
peace." 125 The words of Julien Souhait had become deeds; the optimistic
cosmopolitanism of the early days of the revolution had been obliter-
ated; and the high-flown ambiguities of the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and Citizen had been resolved in favor of the nation-state.
Foreigners - made known by the papers they carried - were declared
suspects as a matter of routine.

The reinstitution and strengthening of passport controls in revolutionary
France - a process more or less unbroken after early 1792, punctuated by
occasional attempts at liberalization - confirms Tocqueville's conclusion
that the French Revolution went through "two distinct phases: one in
which the sole aim of the French nation seemed to be to make a clean
sweep of the past; and a second, in which attempts were made to salvage
fragments from the wreckage of the old order." 126 Although much work
remained to be done before the state could effectively assert its monopoly
on the legitimate means of movement within France and across its bound-
aries, the "new regime" had made clear that it had no intention of
adopting the attitude of the Constituent Assembly that passports should
be abolished and freedom of movement should carry the day.

As we have seen, the revolutionary governments, beset by enemies
domestic and foreign, real and imagined, sought to use passport con-
trols and other documentary means - "fragments from the wreckage of
the old order" - to regulate the movements of emigres, counterrevolu-
tionary brigands, refractory priests, itinerant mendicants, conscripted

55

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

soldiers, and the foreign-born, among others. While these devices
may have been effective in many instances, the chaos and disorder
ravaging the country, the efforts of dissident groups, and the lack of a
well-articulated bureaucratic apparatus simply overwhelmed the govern-
ment's capacity to assert a successful monopoly on the legitimate means
of movement at this time.

Yet steps had been taken in this direction, as well as toward the imple-
mentation of effective distinctions between native and foreigner
founded on documents. In part, of course, such efforts foundered on
the incoherence of the international state system, especially during the
various wars that plagued Europe until the end of the Napoleonic era. In
the absence of an organized passport system, countries such as France
that required passports to legitimate movement were forced simply to
issue these to foreigners themselves, rather than being able to expect
them to arrive with the required document, as we now take for granted
must be the case. Still, by instituting civil status (Vetat civil), the secular
registration of each new addition to the French populace, the new
regime in France had made a major advance toward enabling it to
embrace its citizens and make them available for its own purposes.

Let us now turn to a consideration of the situation in nineteenth-
century Europe, as the burgeoning fortunes of economic liberalism
made free circulation appear an unavoidable necessity for industrial
development, and the falling away of older documentary controls
culminated in a period of extraordinary freedom of movement.

56

CHAPTER 3

SWEEPING OUT AUGEAS'S STABLE:
THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND
TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

The defeat of Napoleonic adventurism and the stabilization of European
interstate relations following the Congress of Vienna (1815) soon led to a
relaxation of the controls on movement that had gone into effect during
the revolutionary conflagrations, or that had existed since long before
they began. The century-long period of relative peace that followed con-
stituted the framework for the dissolution of feudal ties where they still
held sway, a process that in Prussia began during the Napoleonic wars and
was in part a form of compensation to those elements of the male popula-
tion drafted into military service during those conflicts. Clausewitz and
other reformers realized that German society would have to be trans-
formed in a more liberal and egalitarian direction if it were to be in a
position to match the fighting ability that had been newly demonstrated
by the French "nation in arms." 1 Liberation from traditional dues and
obligations also gained impetus, of course, from the example set by the
abolition of feudalism in France in August 1789. In short, keeping the
peasants bound to the land as they had been since the so-called "manorial
reaction" of the sixteenth century grew increasingly untenable in western
Europe, though the East remained as yet little affected by this trend.

This newly won freedom was deeply troubling to the guardians of social
order. In the early nineteenth century (at least in Germany, but surely not
only there) , the nervous view was widespread among them that "nothing
has appeared ... to replace the previous patronage [of the lord] over the
peasant."' 2 Those responsible for superintending the "dangerous classes"
were frequently rendered apoplectic at the heightened possibility that
large numbers of "masterless men" might be found traveling the country's
roads unhindered. The labor needs of an industrial capitalist economy in
statu nascendi combined with the decline of serfdom, however, to promote

57

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

a dramatic slackening of restrictions on movement in the course of the
nineteenth century. Despite much hand-wringing on the part of the
"better element," this trend culminated in 1867 with the Prussian-led
North German Confederation's explicit abolition of all documentary
requirements authorizing travel, whether these concerned citizens of
the Confederation's member states or foreigners. At the same time that
movement was liberalized, however, the Confederation reasserted its
right to demand that persons "legitimate" themselves; the loosening of
restrictions on travel could not be allowed, the state's guardians insisted,
to diminish its capacity to "embrace" the population for policing and
other purposes.

In this chapter, I concentrate primarily on the vicissitudes of documen-
tary controls on movement in the German lands. The focus is on
reconstructing the processes whereby this period gave rise to considerably
greater legal freedom of movement, often irrespective of a person's
nationality, than had been known in Europe since before the rise of
modern states aiming to monopolize the legitimate means of movement.

FROM THE EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTRY TO THE END OF THE
NAPOLEONIC ERA

From at least 1548, the German lands had known documentary restric-
tions on the movements of the lower orders. At Augsburg in that year,
the Imperial Diet had mandated that the "masterless rabble" (herrenloses
Gesinde) - those with "no master or spokesperson (Vorsprecher)" - be in
possession of imperial travel documents in order to pass through those
lands without hindrance, or otherwise risk expulsion. The language
suggests the extent to which the state was acting in place of the feudal
lord who would normally be expected to regulate the movements of
the person (s) in question. Shortly thereafter, at least according to one
mid-nineteenth-century observer, "passports" make their first entry into
the language of the law. 3

Early in the reign of Frederick William I of Prussia (1713-40), the
so-called "Soldier King," a law intended to sharpen controls on beggars,
vagabonds, and "other evil rabble" for the first time required foreigners
(Ausldndische) to have in their possession a passport, which was to be
visaed nightly at the waystations along their route. Natives were to equip
themselves with the "usual" passes. 4 During the course of his reign, the
Soldier King would eventually prohibit all emigration by peasants, an
order for the infraction of which the punishment was death. 5 Then, in
1753, a police measure mandated that "all traveling pedestrians and per-
sons riding [horses] individually, insofar as they are not [army] officers
or other distinguished persons, must be in possession of passports."

58

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

Innkeepers were to assist the authorities in enforcing these laws by report-
ing each night on the presence of strangers in their accommodations. 6

We should be careful not to take these draconian pronouncements
too seriously, however. "The prohibitions on emigration," an Italian
analyst of migration has noted, "could not stop a movement that had
struck such deep roots in the country, and which political oppression,
often accompanied by economic distress, rendered necessary as a
release (liberazione) ." 7 This was, after all, a period of substantial German
emigration to North America, a flow engendered in part by the authori-
ties' relaxation of emigration restrictions with the aim of ridding the
country of religious squabbles. 8 But the major influx of Germans was
still to come, and would have to await the emancipation of the peasantry
and the decline of mercantilist attitudes toward population-as-wealth.

The liberation of the peasants in early nineteenth-century Germany
would bring decisive steps to loosen restrictions on movement for the
lower strata. With Napoleon's defeat of Prussia at Jena in 1806, the Holy
Roman Empire of the German Nation had met its final demise. Given
that a re-match with France was sooner or later inevitable, the Prussian
King, Frederick William III, responded with measures designed to bring
into existence a coherent body of subjects "with a sufficient stake in their
nation so that they would be willing to fight and die for it." The so-called
October Edict of 1807 freed the Prussian peasantry from hereditary
servitude, traditional labor obligations and dues, and seigneurial
restraints on their ownership of land. Many occupations were opened to
all comers, stripping the guilds of their power to regulate access to
employment. These measures were nothing less than the first strides
down the road to a free market in labor. At the urging of the reformers
arrayed around Karl Freiherr vom Stein, halting steps were also taken in
the direction of popular participation in government. 9

Despite some significant successes in a difficult period, however, the
Prussian reforms could go only so far in a situation of (partial) military
occupation and the imminent resumption of war. Following Napoleon's
disastrous winter campaign in Russia, Czar Alexander undertook in late
February 1813 an alliance with Prussia to save European Christianity
from the godless French despot. 10 As the confrontation with France
loomed, controls on movement were tightened anew. On 20 March 1813,
a week before the official declaration of war against France, Frederick
William III announced that it was necessary, "for the survival of the inde-
pendence of our crown and our people," to promulgate a new passport
law. 11 The punctiliousness of the regulations - their specificity regarding
those affected, the precision concerning how border-crossings were to
take place, the firmness with which the statute defined the relevant offi-
cialdom - makes the measures we have examined in revolutionary

59

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

France seem haphazard and ramshackle by comparison. Unlike the
French revolutionaries, of course, the Prussian King had no interest in
debating fine philosophical points about the freedom of movement, at
least not for publication. He had a realm to save.

As one observer has noted, the 1813 law was mainly designed to keep
out the spies that "inundated" the country during wartime. 12 This inter-
pretation is indeed suggested by the new documentary requirements.
Upon entering Prussian territory, travelers from abroad were constrained
to take possession of a Prussian passport issued not by local authorities
(apparently the usual or at least an accepted practice), but by higher-level
officials ranging from the Royal Chancellor down to the central govern-
ment's police representative at the provincial level. The persistence of the
practice whereby incoming travelers were furnished with a passport by the
receiving state, rather than by the state of the traveler's origin, is notable
here. Those who failed to have their passports visaed nightly in the town
where they stayed, or who left the route inscribed in their passports, were
subject to arrest and expulsion. Particular mention was made of the law's
application to artisans and craftsmen, "irrespective of whether they have a
journeyman's book [Wanderbuch- a document attesting to the craftsman's
passage through the elaborate German apprenticeship system] or only a
foreign passport." Russian and other allied troops and commanders were
exempted from these requirements, as were certain groups of people
traveling for business purposes, and diplomats.

At the same time, those subject to the restrictions on entry were
forbidden to leave Prussia without a passport issued by authorities above
the local level and duly visaed at the border. The foreigners and
unknown persons circulating in the country were to be subjected to
heightened scrutiny by the Prussian security forces, though not only
by them: the law requested the assistance of landowners, innkeepers,
cart-drivers, and others in its implementation. In addition, the statute
forbade artisans to employ foreign or returning native apprentices, or
to release them for work abroad. The serious penalties invoked for
violation of this provision suggest that one may regard this aspect of the
law as a forerunner of the "employer sanctions" associated with the
immigration policies of our own time.

Despite the intensified surveillance to be exercised over those groups
deemed to be potential spies, however, the law adopted an indulgent
attitude toward Prussian subjects. The new passport formalities were not
incumbent upon Prussian subjects returning from abroad, as long as
they satisfactorily identified themselves (sick legitimiren) in some other
way. Nor was there, in Frederick William's benign view, any need to
restrict the movements of Prussian subjects in the country's interior.
This lax posture was due, he said, to "our subjects' laudable devotion

60

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

{riihmliche Anhanglichkeit) to the state." This may well have been a self-
serving claim, but Frederick William's judgment of the popular mood
reflected both rising anti-French sentiment among the Prussian popu-
lace and the King's conversion to the notion that a war for national
liberation should be combined with a war for domestic freedoms. 13

The new passport regulations were thus principally preoccupied with
the movements of potential foreign enemies and spies, but they were
remarkably lenient toward Prussian subjects themselves. 14 This relaxed
attitude toward freedom of movement was sensible for a ruler eager to
sustain the enthusiasm of those soon to be recruited into the army in
order to restore Prussian sovereignty and regain Prussian lands lost to
Napoleon. The spring offensive began in April, and a new conscription
law followed within a few months. By August of 1813, "the decisive strug-
gle for Europe's future" was underway. 15

It was a battle that Napoleon would ultimately lose. In September, the
rulers of Austria, Prussia, and Russia signed a series of treaties at Teplitz
that committed them to fight together until Napoleon's ultimate defeat
and to restore Austria and Prussia to their shape in 1805. The "battle of
nations" ( Volkerschlacht) that ensued at Leipzig in October 1813 signaled
the end of the French Emperor's hegemony in Europe. Even if Waterloo
(June 1815) was still nearly two years away, Prussia and its allies had crip-
pled the power of the French war machine, and Napoleon would soon
be packed off to exile on the island of Elba.

Against this background - "because the political conditions that
required considerations of public circulation to be firmly subordinated
to those of general security" in the previous year's passport law had
changed so much for the better - Frederick William HI in late February
1814 issued an edict to liberalize the regulations concerning the move-
ments of lorry drivers, livestock dealers, and artisans, though the greatest
attention was paid to the latter group. With the state of military emer-
gency past, artisans entering from "friendly" states could now gain access
to Prussian territory on the authority of a passport issued by municipal
authorities in their country of origin, and no longer had to submit to
annoying delays while awaiting a Prussian passport at the border, as had
been the case since the promulgation of the March 1813 law. Upon due
inspection by border guards of the passports they carried, however, they
were to receive an unstamped "interim passport" that would authorize
travel to the provincial or other appropriate office empowered by the
1813 law to issue the entry passport. The new regulation thus allowed the
affected persons into Prussia without a time-consuming application for
documents for which they had to wait at the border, instead allowing
them to acquire the documents in their own time in a direct encounter
with the relevant authorities. Yet mercantilist and feudal ideas about the

61

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

retention of skilled workers maintained their grip largely unaltered; the
restrictions enunciated in the 1813 law remained in effect for artisans
wishing to depart. 16 Needless to say, these kinds of restrictions on depar-
ture, characteristic of most ancien regme states, anticipate later attempts
to forestall "brain drain" out of the "Third World."

With Wellington's final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, the Great
Powers of Europe proceeded to redraw the map of the continent. In this
process, Prussia regained considerable portions of its old lands, as well
as new territorial concessions that included two fifths of Saxony and
extensive areas in the Rhineland and Westphalia. By absorbing parts of
the more progressive and wealthy areas of the south and west, these
acquisitions shifted Prussian geography sharply from its traditional
eastern agricultural bastions. In addition, the treaties emerging from
the Congress of Vienna erected a sort of halfway house on the road to
German national unification. The German Confederation (Bund) cre-
ated in 1815 included some thirty-nine members, among whom the
leaders were Prussia and Austria (or more precisely those Habsburg and
Hohenzollern lands that had previously been part of the Holy Roman
Empire). The loose linking of the states of the German Confederation
served the purposes of statesmen seeking to weigh down Prussian power
on the one hand, and of small states worried about losing their
sovereignty on the other. Yet it failed to satisfy enthusiasts of the German
national project and thus imparted considerable impetus to their
burgeoning cause."

In this context, the Prussian King, Frederick William III, abolished
the wartime statute of 1813 in order to reverse the earlier balance and
now "pay as much regard to the freedom of travel and commerce as to
security in the interior of our monarchy." The new passport law of 22
June 1817 18 liberalized the restrictive provisions of the earlier law mainly
(paragraph 4) by restoring to local, border, and port officials the author-
ity to issue valid documents for entry into Prussia. Also added to the list
of those authorized to give out passports for entry were Prussian diplo-
mats accredited at foreign courts, official trade emissaries and consuls,
and - most notably - the "national" and provincial officials of other states
(even, in the case of those coming to Prussia simply to "take the waters,"
local officials of other states as well). This was an innovation, at least
since the Napoleonic era; heretofore, the Prussian government had jeal-
ously insisted that its indigenous organs alone should issue such
documents. Those exempted from the requirements concerning an
entry passport included ruling princes and the members of their house-
holds, returning Prussian subjects in possession of a valid exit passport,
craftsmen with a valid Wanderbuch, women with their husbands, and chil-
dren with their parents.

62

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

Exit from Prussia was, in the terms of 1817 passport law, another
matter altogether. Technically, no one - whether native-born or foreign
- was permitted to leave the country without a passport authorizing
their departure. Exemption from these restrictions was provided for
those not requiring a passport for entry and those who arrived from
abroad with acceptable foreign passports, though these had to be visaed
by the police in the Prussian town from which they were returning to
their country of origin. In contrast to the situation with regard to entry
passports, however, those for exit were not to be issued by local police
officials, but only by authorities at the provincial level or higher.
(Actually, officials of provincial governments were only permitted to
issue passports if a passport from this relatively low level would satisfy the
entry requirements in the country to which the person was traveling,
"about which the [provincial] governments are to receive more detailed
instructions from the Ministry of Police.") Foreign diplomats accredited
to the Prussian court had the right to issue passports to other diplomatic
personnel, but these still had to be visaed by the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs or the Ministry of Police, depending on the rank of the person-
nel involved.

In the third section, the law said simply that native Prussians
(Inlander) moving about within the country required no passport from
the police, "but may travel freely and unhindered without one." Such
persons were nonetheless required to identify themselves to the police
officers who might demand that they do so, on pain of various penalties.
The next paragraph of the statute offered the possibility of acquiring an
"identity card" (Legitimationskarte) to facilitate such identification,
obtainable from either the Ministry of Police, the provincial govern-
ment, or the police in the place of domicile. The card was to include the
person's description (Signalement) , to be valid for one year, and to cost
the relatively meager sum of four Groschen (including the two Groschen
official stamp). Yet not all "Inlander" escaped the requirement of carry-
ing a passport for internal movement; these non-exempt groups
included certain types of journeymen, those traveling in postal con-
veyances, and non-citizen Jews.

All passports, whether for entry or departure, were to be visaed by the
border police closest to the point of entry or exit, as well as by the police
in those places where the bearer remained for a period exceeding
twenty-four hours. The latter requirement was imposed upon internal
passports as well.

The slackening of documentary restrictions on movement mandated
by the law was not to result in a diminution of public order, however.
The law directed the various security organs to exercise a "greater atten-
tion to and surveillance over travelers and strangers ... so that, despite

63

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

the facilitation of movement accorded to the innocent traveler, public
and private security should not be endangered, and so that the work of
vagabonds and criminals is not made easier." In order to avoid a situa-
tion in which the loosening of official documentary controls on
movement would yield these results, the laws directed at these "danger-
ous classes and individuals" were to be sharpened. The point of all these
regulations was to insure that the "innocent" travelers be in a position to
identify themselves, and to see to it that the suspicious and the danger-
ous "come into contact as often as possible with the police." 19 In short,
public security was not to fall by the wayside, however appropriate it
might be to relax controls on movement during peacetime. The official
response to the enhanced mobility of the lower classes, according to Alf
Ludtke, "was to create a seamless web of registration (permits, residence
permits, etc.) combined with the vigorous, but futile injunction to the
police authorities 'not to let travelers out of their sight'." 20

The new passport law of 1817 was of a piece with a broader loosening
of controls on movement in post-Napoleonic Germany and in keeping
with the proto-national character of the German Confederation. As
Brubaker has noted, the Act of Confederation (Bundesakt) extended to
all its member states a number of earlier bilateral agreements permit-
ting greater freedom of movement and settlement among German
states. 21 Yet the evidence we have seen from the Prussian passport law of
1817 indicates clearly that Brubaker is premature in claiming that these
treaties "abolished controls on exit but not on entry" and that "a person
could leave any state [in the Confederation] without obtaining special
permission . . ," 22 Even at mid-century, prospective emigrants from
Germany typically "had to obtain certificates from the tax collector, the
pastor, and from school district officials that he owed them no taxes or
tithes; he had to be free or forgiven of private debt; he had to fill out
elaborate forms, and relinquish his citizenship; by law he had to be
officially informed that he was being foolish." 23 Although the actual
enforcement of these strictures varied by time and place, and they were
more or less ineffectual and easily skirted in any case, it is clear that the
German states had not yet adopted a liberal stance with respect to depar-
ture of their subjects.

Nor was it only Prussia that sought to stem emigration. For example,
Wiirttemberg, a Confederation member, still had a prohibition against
emigration on its books, though the provision was enforced only selec-
tively and in fact most emigration from the German lands during this
period came from the southwest. Thus several thousand Swabians left
for Russia before that country's enthusiasm about their coming waned
in the face of declining supplies of free land in the Transcaucasus. In
May 1817, the Wiirttemberg government therefore announced that it

64

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

would no longer issue exit permits for Russia unless would-be emigrants
had received certification to immigrate from the Russian authorities,
who had no interest in absorbing destitute foreigners who would be
unable to feed themselves without a plot of their own. The swarms of rel-
atively impoverished prospective emigrants met similar responses from
officials in western Prussia, the Duchy of Nassau, the Netherlands (at
that time a province of the German Confederation), and Bavaria. As a
result, by June of 1817, the government of Wurttemberg had broadened
its requirements that emigrants meet the restrictions imposed by foreign
governments; "this meant in effect that no passes would be issued to the
sort of people who had been requesting them." 24 Even if people could
get out of southwestern Germany, however, by 1819 the Russian govern-
ment instructed its representative in Wurttemberg to visa no more
passports for the Transcaucusus, which further complicated access to
that region. 25

Despite insistent pleas from local government officials who viewed emi-
gration as a safety valve for their communities' straitened poor relief
budgets and a last, desperate hope for the emigrants themselves, higher-
level authorities equivocated. Grand Duke Karl of Baden said only that
emigration "ought neither to be encouraged nor prohibited." In short,
perhaps the best one can say is that policies regarding emigration from
the German states were in some disarray, poised between older mercan-
tilist attitudes chary of emigration and more liberal ones that viewed it as
healthy for both the state and the emigrants themselves. Indeed, despite
the official ban on emigration, the Wurttemberg government saw fit to
establish a section for emigration affairs in the Interior Ministry in 1817.
The barriers to departure posed by passport and other controls on move-
ment were in all events hardly insurmountable; many - especially the
indebted or those fleeing other obligations - simply left without them. 26

I suspect that the confusion concerning Brubaker's claims about the
freedom to exit lies in the translation of the term Freiziigigkeit. The term
may be rendered as "freedom of movement" but its more technical mean-
ing in German treaties and laws of the nineteenth century concerned
freedom of settlement I am principally preoccupied here with the prob-
lem of Bewegungsfreiheit - literally (and exclusively), freedom of
movement. While the scope of each had expanded during the period in
question, freedom of exit - irrespective of the question of where one
intended to live - had not progressed as rapidly as the legal freedom to
settle elsewhere than in one's original domicile, though freedom of set-
tlement was hardly unencumbered as yet either. 27

Prussia, certainly, had not yet abandoned the mercantilist attitude
toward population that led it to oppose (though it did not technically
prohibit) emigration as a matter of course. In 1820, beleaguered by an

65

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

exodus of its subjects that it blamed on commercial emigration agents
(forerunners of today's "coyotes" in Mexico, and of migration smugglers
more generally), the Prussian government imposed jail terms on anyone
found guilty of inducing its citizens to leave the country, and such curbs
would remain a staple of Prussian policy at least until mid-century. 28
Moreover, into the 1830s most of the German states denied passports to
their departing subjects unless they could demonstrate that the destina-
tion country would admit them. The result was that an early version of
the visa system as we know it today began to operate, as prospective emi-
grants went to the relevant foreign consulate to obtain the documents
they needed in order to receive dispensation to leave their country. 29
While such measures obviously reflect the persistence of mercantilist
attitudes, it may also have been designed to protect potential migrants
from giving up their livelihoods in Germany without being certain of
landing on hospitable soil. As we shall see, it is precisely this rationale
that was later offered for the creation of the American visa system in the
1920s. Emigration restriction and paternalistic impulses commingled
inextricably in laws such as these.

In all events, although controls on movement within Prussia were
lightened considerably during this period, the sort of un trammeled free-
dom of exit which Brubaker identified as having taken place in the
second decade of the nineteenth century would in fact still be some time
in coming.

PRUSSIAN BACKWARDNESS? A COMPARATIVE LOOK AT THE SITUATION
IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

In view of the apparent stringency at this time of Prussian restrictions on
movement and especially on exit, it may be salutary to cast a sideward
glance at the question of movement controls in the British Isles during
this period. As the leading edge in the development of industrial capi-
talism, Great Britain should presumably have led the way in the creation
of free markets in labor, of which an essential component was the dis-
mantling of "feudal" restraints and the consequent mobility of labor.
Manufacturing industry could hardly advance without being able to
draw in the hands it needed from wherever they might wish to come.

As we have previously noted, the Elizabethan Poor Laws and the Act
of Settlement and Removal of 1662 had created the legal foundations of
"parish serfdom," which sharply restricted the movements of English
subjects within the country. Given the social consequences of the enclo-
sure of common lands, as a result of which "sheep ate men" and large
numbers of peasants were forced off the land and into the arms of a still
embryonic industry, it seems doubtful that the statute could have been

66

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

very vigorously enforced. Still, in 1795 the British partially repealed the
Act of Settlement in the interest of freeing hands to go where burgeon-
ing capitalist enterprise needed them most. Parish serfdom was thus
abolished and the physical mobility of English workers restored. Karl
Polanyi has suggested that the simultaneous institution of the
Speenhamland system, which provided poor relief in a number of
English and Welsh counties regardless of earned income, discouraged
workers from striking out in search of employment and thus stood in the
way of a competitive national labor market. 30 Yet more recent research
has indicated that the evidence is thin for "the notion of a rural popula-
tion tied to its parishes by poor relief." 31

To the enlarged freedom of internal movement enjoyed by English
workers around this time was added a massive influx into England of
Irish migrants, a flow considerably facilitated by the Act of Union in
1800. The Act gave the Irish masses common citizenship in the United
Kingdom, and thus greater access to English soil. For extraordinary
numbers of Irishmen, to be sure, the trip across the Irish Sea was only
the prelude to emigration to America; cheaper and more accessible
passage was to be had from Liverpool than from Irish ports as a result of
the more regular triangular trade between England and the United
States. The upshot of this Irish migration was that "in place of one, there
. . . emerged two closely interacting Irish societies poised on the oppo-
site seaboards of the Atlantic . . ." 32

This pattern substantially lessened the impact of Irish immigration on
the English population. In part for this reason, as one observer has put
it, "throughout the bulk of the period of mass Irish immigration, the
British state adopted a more or less laissez faire open-door policy to the
regulation of the new arrivals." 33 This relaxed stance toward Irish immi-
gration to England would wane along with the decline among the
British governing elite of mercantilist attitudes that favored population
growth and retention, but it would be some time yet before decisive
segments of the ruling classes abandoned those views.

As in Prussia after the October Edict of 1807 emancipating the
peasants, the enhanced freedom of internal movement within the
United Kingdom after 1 795 did not necessarily entail greater freedom to
depart the realm. The specter of "depopulation," that bogey of the
mercantilist mind, still haunted the sleep of the British notables.
Accordingly, Parliament adopted in 1803 the first of the so-called
"Passenger Acts." Despite avowedly humanitarian intentions, which were
embodied in the law's regulations concerning accommodations for
transoceanic passengers who were then typically regarded by ship cap-
tains as little more than a substitute for ballast, the Act was "cradled in
mercantilism," and strict penalties were laid down for infractions of its

67

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

provisions. While vigorous implementation of the 1803 Act would have
improved the conditions of passage, it would also have cut down signifi-
cantly on the number of those departing from England for American
shores. Yet the first of the British Passenger Acts was never seriously
enforced, according to their historian, Oliver MacDonagh. If it had
been, in MacDonagh 's view, the emergence of the "Great Atlantic
Migration" would likely have been severely inhibited. 34

Only after Waterloo did the mercantilist impulse in migration policy
begin to give way definitively to free trade - or at least to those who
draped their "emigrationist" sentiments in its spreading robes. The ces-
sation of hostilities brought a surge of unemployment, depression, and
"Malthusian forebodings." The riots at Peterloo (Manchester) in 1819,
during which ten demonstrators were killed and hundreds injured while
protesting for working-class demands, helped to shock the ruling elite
into awareness that the "social question" was gaining in political signifi-
cance. Thus "by 1819 we find a select committee on the poor laws
virtually recommending emigration to the workless," and Parliament in
the same year made its first grant for state-supported colonization. 35 The
British sought to export their joblessness by loosening restraints on - or,
indeed, positively encouraging - departures. A desire to regulate a labor
market conceived in national terms thus increasingly determined
British policies concerning departure from the realm.

As always, however, there were two sides to the migration coin. Just as
the British were seeking to export their idle hands, economic distress led
the United States - the chief destination of British emigrants despite gov-
ernment attempts to steer them towards Canada - officially to discourage,
if not to restrict immigration. As the publicist Hezekiah Niles put it in his
Weekly Register: "The time has been when we were pleased to see the
progress of emigration [from Europe]. It is now painful to observe it
because of the want of employment for our own people." 36 The city of
New York responded to the emergency by taking steps to limit the landing
of aliens likely to become public charges. In the event, the measures were
circumvented with relative ease and rendered largely ineffectual.

The lean years faced by English laborers in the late 1810s and the social
misery they engendered helped to concentrate the mind of the British
elite in this respect. By the mid-1820s, free trade motives had come to
dominate parliamentary debates over emigration policy. Long-standing
bans on the departure of seamen and artisans - including a provision that
every prospective emigrant present a certificate signed by the authorities
in his native parish attesting that he was not a "manufacturer" or "artifi-
cer" - and various regulations concerning emigrants and their possessions
fell by the wayside in 1824-25. "The last survivals of the ancien regime" in
emigration policy had finally given way before the liberal onslaught. 37

68

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

Yet if departures were made easier in order to take the burden off the
domestic labor market and poor rolls, it only made sense that access to the
territory should be restricted to avoid the incursion of excess hands. The
Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 abolished the Speenhamland system
and took poor relief out of the hands of individual parishes. "The popula-
tion of rural England," Marcus Lee Hansen has written, "after more than
two centuries of stagnation, found itself in motion." This pruning back of
disincentives to internal mobility further encouraged the national govern-
ment to reduce the numbers of the indigent in England, for it now
assumed greater responsibility for the country's poor. Not coincidentally,
the Act authorized the use of local funds to assist in emigration schemes.
As free trade replaced mercantilism, the labor market and poor relief were
increasingly "nationalized"; poor relief legislation was extended to Ireland
in 1837. 38 "Free trade" implied not open borders, but protection of the
labor and welfare "markets" at the national rather than the local level.

This interpretation seems the only sensible way to understand why
Great Britain in 1836 moved sharply toward the regulation of foreigners,
for the English had long been remarkably open to outsiders. The Magna
Carta of 1215 had guaranteed to merchants from other lands the right
to come into and leave England at will "except in time of war and if they
are of the land that is at war with us." Even then, such persons would
remain unmolested if the King determined that his subjects were well-
treated in the countries with which he was at war. 39 Yet war played no
role in the 1836 legislation. Instead, bad harvests in Scotland and the
breakup of traditional agriculture in Ireland made for hard times. 40

The Aliens Restriction Act of 1836, coming at a time when the great
powers in Europe were at peace with one another, heralded a new
departure. 41 Henceforth ship captains arriving "from foreign parts" were
to declare to the chief customs officer in the port of arrival the name,
rank, occupation, and description of any aliens on board. Furthermore,
any non-English person was required, upon disembarkation at any port
of the Kingdom, to present to the customs officer "any passport which
may be in his or her possession," or to make a declaration to him stating
"to what country he or she belongs and is subject, and the country and
place from whence he or she shall then have come." The language of
the ordinance suggests that the British government was not expecting
that every foreigner arriving on its shores would, in fact, be in possession
of a passport and did not appear to make admission contingent on pre-
sentation of such a document. The British were nonetheless noticeably
ahead of the Germans, at least in the letter of the law, when it came to
recognition of the fact that travelers might be male or female.

Exempted from these requirements were authorized representatives of
foreign governments and their domestic servants, as well as any alien who

69

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

had lived continuously within the realm for three years, provided that this
was certified by the appropriate officials. Yet exemptions from documen-
tary evidence of nationality create their own problems; nationality cannot
be read off a person's forehead, and thus it requires some sort of persua-
sive demonstration, usually involving other documents than those normally
required. The Aliens Restriction Act thus noted that "if any question shall
arise whether any person alleged to be an alien ... is an alien or not . . .
the proof that such person is ... a natural-born subject of his Majesty, or a
denizen of this Kingdom, or a naturalized subject, or that such person, if
an alien, is not subject to the provisions of this Act or any of them . . . shall
lie on the person so alleged to be an alien . . ."

Such provisos presumably stimulated the development of documen-
tary attestations of a person's right to claim access to British soil, a
function eventually assumed by the passport though at this point the
requirement concerned precisely those who asserted claims to entry
without need of a passport (i.e., British subjects). One imagines that,
under these circumstances, well-dressed travelers speaking the King's
English probably had no difficulty passing as Englishmen and -women,
whereas "passing" in this manner was probably more difficult for a
notional Italian shoemaker who, despite having plied his trade in
London for two decades at his Majesty's pleasure, wished to return to his
workshop after a visit to la famiglia in Turin. Our shoemaker would have
needed some sort of papers demonstrating his claim to entry.

Foreshadowing later developments, the Act also required that customs
officials keep an "aliens list," although at least one commentator has
suggested that this was a "rather haphazard practice." 42 Rounding out
the regulations was a requirement that aliens make known to those offi-
cials their intention to depart the realm before doing so. In addition to
subjecting incoming aliens to heightened scrutiny that could provide
the classificatory foundation for their exclusion by establishing their
alienage, the Act thus promoted the creation of the administrative
machinery necessary for the state to keep track of all aliens leaving and
sojourning in the country at any given time.

Such legislation was hardly in keeping with any principled notion of
free trade, which now carried the day in other respects, culminating in
the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. The enhanced energy devoted to
keeping track of aliens was consistent, however, with the policy of the
so-called "emigrationists" to encourage and facilitate departures from
"overpopulated" areas of the realm, especially Ireland, and with a
broader British effort to reduce the size of the resident population and
thus to ameliorate problems of unemployment. Even if it was no
paragon of economic liberalism, the 1836 Act marked a departure from
the "population is good" mentality characteristic of mercantilism. The

70

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

Aliens Restriction Act pointed to the rising inclination of European gov-
ernments to create bureaucratic mechanisms that would allow them to
keep track of entering persons' nationality - a capacity which, in turn,
would permit them more successfully to limit unwanted foreign immi-
gration when they wished to do so. The Act was also a salutary reminder
that the expansion of the freedom of movement in Europe was by no
means absolute. The British blazed the trail that led to the elimination
of controls on "internal" movements and the displacement of those con-
trols to the "national" borders. The "foreigner," once perhaps only from
the next parish, was increasingly the alien, the non-national.

The United Kingdom moved to strengthen its capacity to identify and
regulate the movements of foreigners at the same time that it inaugu-
rated a domestic free market in labor. Great Britain thus preceded
Prussia in achieving this essential precondition of industrial capitalism.
Yet in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Germany finally
pruned away the dense feudal underbrush still blocking the path toward
a free labor market, the manpower needs of German industry would
lead Prussia and its confederal partners to pursue a quite different
course than that taken by the British. When the North German
Confederation set about abolishing the last vestiges of the ancien regime
in its lands, it would open its "domestic" labor market to all comers,
whether "German" or foreign. The difference in approach can be
attributed to timing: when the British brought their free national labor
market into being, they felt they had too much labor power on hand;
when the Prussians did so, they feared they had too little.

FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT AND CITIZENSHIP IN EARLY NINETEENTH-
CENTURY GERMANY

The expanded freedom of mobility attendant upon the emancipation of
the serfs in early nineteenth-century Prussia cast into bold relief the
tension between presence in a particular place and the right to mem-
bership therein. In particular, the unwonted circulation of "masterless
men" threw out of joint systems of social provision in which membership
rights had been predicated on residence. The growing freedom to move
around within the territory of the German states increasingly drove the
individual states to determine who had access to their territories and to
the benefits of membership in them.

Accordingly, the nineteenth century was a golden age of the codifica-
tion of citizenship laws, a process directly motivated by the need to
establish who did and who did not have a right to the benefits of mem-
bership in these states. In the German lands, the revision of membership
statutes in response to the decline of serfdom and the attendant rise in

71

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

mobility among the popular classes began shortly after the Congress of
Vienna. First, in Bavaria, the new Constitution of 1818 stipulated that
only those in possession of the so-called Indigenat (i.e., Bavarian "nation-
als") were to be permitted full enjoyment of citizenship (biirgerliche) ,
public, and private rights. At the same time, acquisition of the Indigenat
was made a matter of descent, replacing the principle of residence
( Wohnsitzprinzip) that had previously held sway. Most of the other states of
the German Confederation followed suit soon thereafter. 43

Membership based on residence in a particular place may have been
well suited to a context in which few people moved around. In contrast,
membership rooted in descent was a means of coping with the fact that
enhanced mobility made it more and more difficult to determine who
belonged and who did not, and helped states "hold onto" population
temporarily - or even permanently - living elsewhere than within the
state's territorial boundaries. Jus sanguinis (the "law of the blood")
might thus be thought of as a sort of migratory mercantilism, which
"held onto" people wherever they might choose to go. In contrast to the
migratory mercantilism oijus sanguinis, the jus soli (the "law of the soil")
principle might be regarded as a sedentary mercantilism: hence its
application in openly mercantilist (and physiocratic) ancien regime
France, in late nineteenth-century France when population deficits were
a matter of considerable concern in the face of growing German mili-
tary power, and in the United States when it sought to encourage
immigrants to spawn future citizens to populate its vast territories. 44

Brubaker has argued that this process of defining who belonged to
different states - who was or was not a citizen - "was not the product of
the internal development of the modern state. Rather, it emerged from
the dynamics of interstate relations within a geographically compact,
culturally consolidated, economically unified, and politically (loosely)
integrated state system." 45 While useful for suggesting the "interna-
tional" components that help determine "domestic" citizenship laws,
this point requires some modification. First, the state system - and
hence the distinction between "internal" and "external" - remained in
many respects inchoate at this time. Yet "internal" concerns surely
played their part along with "interstate" considerations; Brubaker pre-
sumably means that citizenship laws were not only the product of
internal developments. More importantly, perhaps, and unlike the situa-
tion in post-revolutionary France, many German towns during the first
half of the nineteenth century retained rights to define membership
and exclude non-members that were incompatible with citizenship sys-
tems conceived on the model of the internally unified nation-state, in
which all were putatively equal before the central government.

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THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

The problem of municipal autonomy was less severe in Prussia than
in the states and principalities of South Germany, where the towns had
long enjoyed privileges that set them off from the larger cities and the
countryside and which the towns defended jealously and zealously. This
tradition would prove a major stumbling block to the first German unifi-
cation that was ultimately consummated in 1871. 46 In Prussia, however,
the situation was different "because local self-government there was a
bureaucratic gift to apathetic townsmen." 47 Yet even in Prussia, the
authority of towns to define who belonged and who did not, and to
exclude those it did not wish to admit to its ranks, stood in the way of the
legal and administrative unification of the territory.

In 1842-43, Prussia moved to overcome this barrier to its superordi-
nate control over who came and went within its dominions. First, the
"Law on the Acquisition and Loss of the Quality of Prussian Subject" sys-
tematically defined who was to be regarded as a Prussian subject. This
pathbreaking statute subsequently served as a model for citizenship laws
in a number of other north and central German states. 48 Brubaker has
neatly described the underlying motivation for this redefinition of
membership:

Effective closure against the migrant poor required a sharper separation
of membership and residence, and a reversal in their causal relationship.
Domicile should be contingent on membership, not membership on
domicile. Membership, defined independendy of residence, should be
the fundamental category. 49

The membership law was enacted together with two others, which
respectively regulated freedom of setdement within Prussia and the terms
under which its municipalities were required to admit migrants from
other parts of the Kingdom. The laws on internal migration guaranteed
freedom of settlement to all but the currently indigent and limited the
right of communal bodies to deny entry to such persons, which until then
had been an important feature of their control over poor relief. These
statutes thus deprived Prussian municipalities of their earlier authority to
close their doors to those they merely feared might become public
charges. 50 At the same time, Prussia affirmed the right of its subjects to
emigrate, except those who owed military service obligations. 51

Taken together, these laws constituted a major contribution to the
construction of a labor market that was truly "national" in scope. By
codifying the criteria associated with Prussian state membership
(Staatsangehdrigkeit) , the government clarified the distinction between
Prussian and non-Prussian. At the same time, by compelling local offi-
cials to accept as residents anyone at least initially able to provide for
themselves, and to afford them poor relief if it subsequently became

73

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

necessary, the Prussian government facilitated the internal migration of
labor that was essential to the country's industrial development. The
effect of these measures was to expand the horizons of mobility of
Prussian subjects and to subject the communes increasingly to unified
poor relief legislation of "national" scope. This transformation made of
Prussia a larger, more coherent space from the point of view of free set-
tlement and pushed outward the legal boundaries of alienage. In legal
terms, the stranger (der Fremde) was increasingly transformed into the
foreigner (der Auslander) , the person from another place into the person
from another country, the local resident into the national.

Because the migration thus engendered was predominantly from
east to west and from countryside to city, however, business elites in the
more industrialized western portions of Prussia actually opposed these
measures. They foresaw the potential for large numbers of needy
migrants "falling on the rates" in periods of economic downturn, a fiscal
responsibility that their municipalities would be forced to assume under
the new arrangements. George Stein metz has demonstrated that the
Prussian bureaucracy regarded it as necessary under these circum-
stances to play the role of an "enlightened capitalist," overriding the
narrow egoism of the commercial bourgeoisie that controlled the west-
ern German industrial dues in favor of a broader vision of Prussia's
capitalist future. 52

From the point of view of the sending regions, the system encouraged
able-bodied villagers to make their way to the industrial districts of the
west without fear that they would find themselves bereft of support in
time of need. At the same time, the sending villages were absolved of the
need to provide for their own non-resident poor, a fact that naturally
helped secure their endorsement of the redistribution of responsibility
for poor relief. It was not until the Poor Law was revised again in 1855
that the distribution of the burdens was reversed, as the principle of res-
idency (Wohnsitz) was entirely eclipsed in favor of that of the "residence
for purposes of poor relief ( Unterstutzungswohnsitz) . By mandating that
municipalities' responsibility for poor relief accrued only after one year
of residency, the 1855 law effectively reversed the earlier flow of liability
for poor support and made sending areas once again responsible for
their non-resident poor, at least for the first - and riskiest - year. Now it
was the agrarians' turn to cry foul, for the new system would force those
unable to support themselves to return to their home villages to seek
poor relief. 53 In all events, these steps well served the functional require-
ments of capitalist industrialization in Prussia.

Although Prussia had gone a considerable distance in the direction
of creating subjects with equal rights to establish themselves across the
territory of the country, it still had some distance to go before it could

74

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

claim to have created a free labor market of truly national scope in
which Prussians were at liberty to move around as they wished.
Documentary controls on their movements remained an annoying hin-
drance that would be removed only as Germany took the last, decisive
steps on the road to "national" unification. In the event, the "national"
labor market that was then called into being was, from our contempo-
rary perspective, remarkably open to non-Germans.

TOWARD THE RELAXATION OF PASSPORT CONTROLS IN THE GERMAN
LANDS

Until mid-century, the German states continued to throw obstacles in
the way of would-be emigrants. Often the authorities pursued this aim by
imposing taxes and fees (such as the so-called Nachsteuer) designed to
discourage exit or to make it impossible for those with insufficient
means. Shaken by the revolutionary upheavals that rocked virtually all of
Europe in 1848, however, numerous German states relaxed such restric-
tions. In part, this shift was intended to provide a safety valve for social
unrest, giving unhindered passage to those who were most troublesome
to the authorities. Yet it also reflected the liberalism of the forces that
spearheaded the Frankfurt Parliament, which included among its draft
catalog of fundamental rights a provision that the state was no longer to
be permitted to restrict the right of emigration except with respect to
the fulfillment of military service obligations. This notion found its way
into the majority of the new constitutions of the German states. Various
proposals for the creation of an official Reich agency to regulate
migrants - emigrants, not immigrants - failed to achieve consensus
before the Frankfurt parliament was reduced to a cadaver; according to
critics of these schemes, administrative resources for such offices were
simply unavailable. 54

Despite this insurgent liberalism in emigration policy, the ascent to
the French throne of Louis Napoleon after his "Eighteenth Brumaire"
alerted German rulers to the fact that they might soon need to muster
the troops again. They therefore sought to keep young men from leav-
ing indiscriminately, efforts that were stepped up as the Crimean War of
1854-56 approached. The actual difficulties of departure depended to a
considerable extent upon where and how one sought to leave. "Passport
formalities were more or less perfunctory" in France, making it relatively
easy for those wishing to slip across the Rhine to escape their military
obligations. In contrast, embarkation in Hamburg or Bremen was
complicated by strict official supervision of steamship passengers, owing
to these cities' concern to remain on good terms with interior states
anxious to retain potential soldiers. 55

75

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

As these developments suggest, the 1850s generally presented the
picture of a continuing struggle between a liberal attitude toward free-
dom of departure and the persistence of mercantilist habits of mind
concerning the value of population to state power. On the liberal
side, a "Pass-Card Treaty" (Passkartenvertrag) of 18 October 1850 among
"all the German states" except the Netherlands, Denmark, Hessen-
Homburg, and Liechtenstein loosened passport requirements for
travelers among them. 56 The treaty simplified and standardized the
information that was to be included in pass-cards: the coat-of-arms of
the issuing state; signature and seal or stamp of the issuing authority;
name, status [Stand], and residence of the bearer; pass register number,
and the bearer's description - age, "characteristics" (Natur), hair color,
and distinguishing marks. The practice of taking away a traveler's pass-
card for the duration of his or her stay was not expressly abolished, but
in practice merely showing it to the authorities was generally regarded
as adequate. (Those who have traveled from the territory of the former
German Democratic Republic into West Berlin - where one's passport
was placed on a conveyor belt and disappeared into a makeshift border
control booth while it was being checked - will appreciate that this
apparently minor change of practice would have contributed markedly
to lessening the anxiety of those presenting their pass-cards for inspec-
tion.) Above all, however, visas were no longer required. Soon
thereafter, an agreement between Austria, Bavaria, Wurttemberg, and
other states mutually abolished visa requirements; Bavaria soon elimi-
nated the practice altogether as "useless."

Yet the Pass-Card Treaty of 1850 bore signs of the persistence of the
old regime as well. First, no subject of any of the participating states 57
had an absolute right to a pass-card. The document was to be issued only
to those known to the authorities and considered to be "reliable" (zuver-
lassig), able to support themselves, and with their principal residence
in the district where the pass-card was to be issued. Those found guilty
of any crime, as well as tramping journeymen (wandernde Gesellen),
servants, jobseekers of all kinds, and those practicing itinerant occupa-
tions, were not to receive pass-cards. "These limitations," according to a
contemporary analyst of passport affairs, "have the advantage for the
bearer of a pass-card that, simply by virtue of having this certificate
(Legitimation), he is recommended to the police authorities as a reliable
person." Under the circumstances, this was of course true; if pass-cards
are required, then those lacking them are ipso facto lawbreakers. Clearly,
however, these restrictions on access to a pass-card reflected a continued
desire to regulate above all the "lower orders" of society, those always
potentially "dangerous classes" whose desire or need to move about
unsettled the authorities in a putatively sedentary society.

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THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

The German states were thus still divided over the matter of granting
an unrestricted right of emigration to their members, as the Frankfurt
Parliament had proposed. Indeed, when the Frankfurt Assembly of
August 1856 created a commission to consider a federal law on emigra-
tion, the results of its investigation revealed a wide diversity of attitudes
among the various German states concerning this issue. Twenty of the
thirty-odd states of the German Confederation favored a requirement
that would-be emigrants obtain an "authorization to emigrate," and that
this authorization be shown before any transportation agreement could
be entered into. Only twelve states opposed the first requirement and
eleven the second. 58

Despite lingering mercantilist attitudes, however, rulers in the
German lands increasingly found themselves drawn ineluctably toward a
more liberal stance in migration matters. Over the next several years,
passport and visa requirements were relaxed or abolished between
"German" states (including the Netherlands) and a series of other coun-
tries, such as England, France, Belgium, and the Scandinavian countries
(although often such relaxation acquired force only where it was recip-
rocal). Saxony eliminated visa requirements entirely in 1862. The
Prussian House of Representatives {Landtag) took up a bill to liberalize
passport controls in the same year. Yet disagreements over the matter of
the government's right temporarily to reintroduce passport require-
ments in times of emergency dragged out the discussion, and the Polish
insurrection of 1863 intervened to kill the bill's chances of adoption. 59

Also in 1862, Switzerland eliminated visa requirements and abolished
the requirement of a passport for entry into or travel within its territory.
A report from the Canton of Basel suggests the extent to which the aban-
donment of certain types of documentary controls was perceived in
some quarters, at least, as simply an unavoidable capitulation to techno-
logical changes introduced by the arrival of the railroad:

Insofar as travelers tend to stop only after great distances that they have
traversed at great speed, and one simply cannot visa their papers after
every little stretch, passports have lost their original value and have
become simply an identification document, similar to local identity papers
(Heimathscheine) , pass-cards, etc. Moreover, the personnel responsible for
passport control have made but few discoveries. The regular arrival of the
trains and the telegraph are more important for the police. With the
changed means of travel, the police have been forced to give up the more
trivial things and have, so to speak, acquired an international type of
activity with which previously they had nothing to do. 60

From this perspective, the narrow, "internal" borders of old were crum-
bling before the onrush of the trains, simultaneously transforming
"domestic" policing into an international undertaking. The massive

77

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

improvement in transportation opportunities for the ordinary person
would soon help persuade German political elites that passport controls
had been rendered largely ineffective, contributing to their willingness
to let them sink into obsolescence.

Yet despite the general trend toward relaxation of regulations that
had required documentation authorizing a specific journey or travel in
general, states were not prepared to give up entirely their ability to
"embrace" mobile people in some fashion. Accordingly, in all of the
cases in which passport requirements were abolished, the states in ques-
tion simultaneously demanded that persons be in a position to identify
themselves in some reliable and acceptable way. The loosening of states'
control over movement did not - and indeed, without a slide toward a
more anarchical state system, could not - mean the abandonment of its
right and capacity to identify persons for purposes of administration and
policing.

Within the various German states themselves, the 1860s were a period
of intense pressure on the part of the bourgeoisie to sweep away out-
moded obstacles to the functioning of an industrial capitalist economy.
Up and down the country, liberal industrialists and opinion-makers
demanded freedom of entry into any trade (Gewerbefreiheit) , freedom of
movement, and freedom of settlement. Burgeoning industry needed
hands, and these freedoms were essential to ensuring that it could have
them when it needed them.

Freedom of movement was vital to employers, the Essen chamber of
commerce noted, for if "indigenous" workers were permitted to upset
the supply of labor by using the strike weapon in labor disputes, employ-
ers must be free to reestablish the balance by drawing in new workers
from outside. Moreover, according to the chamber of commerce in
Breslau (Wroclaw):

It is not enough that freedom of movement be introduced in one state. It
is necessary that in general every citizen of a German state be free to apply
his energy wherever in his opinion he can do so most advantageously, that
industry take its workers wherever it can find them, and that the various
regions transfer their labor force or temporary population surplus without
hindrance and in accordance with their needs. 61

Traditional German Kleins taaterei (the profusion of small principalities,
dukedoms, etc., that dotted the Central European landscape) and the
privileges of towns fettered the emergence of a vibrant industrial capi-
talism, which demanded that the area in which Germans should be able
to move freely be pushed outward toward the "national" boundaries.

Yet the labor needs of German industry took liberals even further in
their calls for greater freedom of movement. So desperate were many of

78

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

the factory barons for labor power that they wanted to open Germany to
anyone who might wish to try their luck there. Liberal propagandists
thus proposed to extend the freedom of movement to foreigners as well.
By adopting laws guaranteeing the freedom of movement, wrote the
liberal Berlin National-Zeitung,

we shall first of all create for the German a fatherland in the matters which
are closest to him. We shall retain the strength and ability which grow so
abundantly in our soil, and we will attract from other nations the strength
and ability which can and want to contribute in our commonwealth to our
welfare, honor, and might. Through freedom of movement we shall create
public spirit and national sentiment, welfare and contentment. 62

The newspaper's editors apparently saw no contradiction in the notion
that foreigners might wish to contribute to German "welfare, honor,
and might"; they seem to have regarded it as a foregone conclusion that
takers would be found for this proposition.

The Darmstadt chamber of commerce was even blunter about its atti-
tude toward opening Germany to the free entry of foreigners:

From the point of view of economic interests, which cannot be influenced
by considerations of foreign policy, the extension of this freedom of move-
ment to outsiders should not be denied under any circumstances, not
even when there is no reciprocity. For the inflow of foreign capital, labor,
and intelligence can only have a good influence on the development of
the country, never a harmful effect. 63

The internationalism of the German bourgeoisie with respect to labor
recruitment was stimulated in part, of course, by a massive emigration -
principally to the United States, to which a million and a quarter
Germans had moved during the decade of the 1850s 64 - of potential
workers availing themselves of the recently enhanced freedom to leave
the country. Despite French fears of demographic inferiority that led
them to dragoon colonial troops in order to remain militarily competi-
tive with the Germans, 65 industrialists across the Rhine worried that their
countrymen were escaping, via emigration, the great maw of factory
work that they needed to keep fed.

The powerful forces - both political and technological - driving in
the direction of greater freedom to move around on the part of the pop-
ular classes entered on a collision course, however, with the policing
impulses of the German states. In Prussia, for example, the police had
grown increasingly preoccupied with the surveillance and control of the
"dangerous classes" during the first half of the nineteenth century.
According to Alf Liidtke:

With a few exceptions, the "higher," cultivated and educated classes were
seen as those "elements" which underpinned and supported the state; in

79

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

contrast, the "lower popular classes" constituted an unpredictable latent
force whose menace could erupt on the streets, or in the taverns, at any
moment - a ready refuge for anti-state "machinations."

Police vigilance was especially intense with respect to itinerants, vagrants,
beggars, and wandering journeymen, who were most likely to suffer the
indignities of harassment by the Passport and Aliens Police {Pafi- und
Fremdenpolizei) . m There is little reason to think that the situation differed
dramatically in other German states; indeed, in the South, where towns'
authority to exclude the poor remained greater, surveillance of the float-
ing population may well have been even more strict than in Prussia.

It was against this background that Saxony, Bavaria, Hanover, and
Wurttemberg concluded the Passport Treaty of 7 February 1865. 67 The
treaty abolished the requirement that travelers within these states,
whether their subjects or foreigners, be equipped with a passport for
entry, exit, or internal circulation, as well as any obligation to have
papers visaed by the authorities. At the same time, however, in keeping
with states' need to maintain their embrace of populations for policing
purposes, travelers still had to be able to demonstrate satisfactorily to the
authorities who they were, where they officially resided, and, "if the
purpose and duration of the trip made it necessary," that they had the
means to support themselves. In order to be in a position to "legitimate"
themselves in this manner, members of the contracting states were
permitted to request an appropriate travel document from the relevant
officials; these documents were to be regarded as valid across the terri-
tories of those states. While each state retained the right to determine
which officials were authorized to issue these travel documents, the
parties to the treaty agreed to limit such authority to the municipality in
which the applicants maintained their official residence. Foreigners who
were otherwise able to legitimate themselves adequately could also
receive a document for travel within the territories covered by the agree-
ment, valid for four weeks. Those hailing from one of the other
contracting states could do the same, but only under the condition that
officials in the place of official residence be informed. The parties to the
treaty also agreed to endeavor to develop simplified, standardized
formats for their travel documents, and to recognize as valid for travel
purposes those identification documents required of "specific classes of
persons in order to pursue their occupations, such as the 'service books'
(Dienstbucher) of domestic servants, the 'work books' (Arbeitsbucher) of
itinerant journeymen and factory workers, etc., as long as they include a
personal description and the signature of the bearer."

Despite these moves to liberalize passport controls on both German
and foreign travelers, the itinerant poor remained subject to special

80

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

restrictions. In order to travel legally in the territories of the contracting
states, persons whose work required them to move about - "musicians,
organ grinders, conjurers, tight-rope walkers, marionette puppeteers,
those traveling with wild or trained animals, knife sharpeners, etc." -
were still required to obtain travel authorization from the appropriate
officials in their state of residence, and these documents were to include
their state or municipal membership, description, and signature. More
significandy, those seeking to find work or to enter domestic service
were subject to the same requirement. The contracting states were also
at liberty to retain or introduce visa requirements for these groups.

Finally, there remained two clauses devoted to special security mea-
sures with respect to passport policy. The contracting parties were free to
deny passports that might be requested by those "from whom there is
reason to fear that they may endanger public security." Each of the parties
to the treaty, moreover, retained the right temporarily to reintroduce
passport requirements "in cases of threat to public security as a result of
war, unrest, or other events or for other substantial reasons."

It is hardly surprising that the contracting states would wish to reserve
to themselves the authority to impose restrictions on movement when
they felt the need to do so, but the continued subjection of the itinerant
"dangerous classes" to special passport obligations flew in the face of
liberal demands for freedom of movement and travel. Under mercantil-
ism, foreigners had often enjoyed greater freedom to come and go than
did subjects of a particular realm, typically because of efforts to restrain
the departure of those with especially desirable skills. Here, however, the
matter was different: special control was exercised exclusively over the
lower classes, who were treated more like "foreigners" in our contempo-
rary terms. The mentality underlying the 1865 passport treaty viewed
the mobile poor as potential criminals who, as such, should always be
subjected to anticipatory surveillance. The resemblance to the treat-
ment of foreigners today, under a more fully developed interstate system
rooted in the idea of the nation-state, is unmistakable. The lower classes
in Germany at this point constituted something like an internal "for-
eign" nation. 68 Yet in consequence of its drive toward creating the
necessary preconditions of capitalist industry, Prussia would soon spear-
head a move to liberalize controls on movement more thoroughly,
specifically exempting the "dangerous classes" as well as foreigners.

THE DECRIMINALIZATION OF TRAVEL IN THE NORTH GERMAN
CONFEDERATION

Although it had been a party to the negotiations leading up to the 1865
Passport Treaty, Prussia ultimately refused to endorse the agreement.

81

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

The terms of the pact had nonetheless left the door open to "all states of
the German Confederation" who had not originally signed on to accede
to it at their convenience, an opportunity of which a number of other
states quickly availed themselves. By the following year, however, the
German Confederation was in a shambles. The Peace of Prague (1866)
that concluded Prussian hostilities with Austria and France mandated
that Prussia form a new confederation in the German lands. Yet the
states of the south, with their traditions of local autonomy, regarded with
considerable trepidation the prospect of finding themselves submerged
in any federated structure led by Berlin. Indeed, a Prussian agent in
Wurttemberg reported to his superiors in the capital that southerners
were mocking the constitution of the North German Confederation that
had been submitted to the constituent Reichstagin February 1867, saying
it included "only three articles: 1. pay, 2. be a soldier, 3. keep your mouth
shut." At first unable to obtain consensus on a new confederation with
the southern states, Bismarck setded instead for a sort of halfway house
on the road to the further consolidation of Germandom. In May 1867,
the Prussian Landtag assented to the constitution, and the North
German Confederation was born. 69

Though largely comprising and certainly dominated by nobles, the
Reichstag of the Confederation soon turned its attention to the concerns
pressed upon it by liberals and industrialists, particularly including the
matters of freedom of movement and travel. While the strongly agrarian
and aristocratic composition of the North German political elite may
make this seem paradoxical, it was not. Steinmetz has noted that while
the Prussian-German state was controlled by groups whose social phys-
iognomy might lead us to expect an instinctive hostility to industrial
capitalism, "at almost every critical juncture these very elites sided with
industry against agriculture and promoted the penetration of capitalist
markets and a capitalist logic in parts of society that were still relatively
traditional." 70 So it was when they turned their attention to the issue of
controls on movement.

The proposed passport law for the North German Confederation was
introduced into the Reichstag at Bismarck's behest on 18 September
1867." In most respects the law followed the terms of the Passport
Treaty of 1865 between Saxony, Bavaria, Hanover, and Wurttemberg.
The bill thus proposed to abolish passport and visa requirements for
subjects of the states of the Confederation as well as for foreigners,
irrespective of whether they were entering, leaving, or moving about
within the territory comprised by the Confederation's member-states.
The law also forbade the continued use or introduction of so-called
"residency cards" (Aufenthaltskarten) throughout the territory of the
Confederation. According to the official commentary accompanying

82

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

the bill, these certificates had already faded from administrative practice
in most of the municipalities of Saxony and Prussia. The law intended to
abolish only those documents designed purely to regulate residency;
those necessary for the continued practice of a trade - even though they
might be referred to as "residency cards" - were permitted to remain.
The legislators' purpose here was clearly to eliminate restrictions on
residency rather than on access to occupations, which they understood
would persist in certain areas.

At the same time, the proposed law reaffirmed the right of the author-
ities to demand that travelers "legitimate themselves" in some reliable
fashion. In furtherance of this objective, the bill provided a legal right to
a passport for any subject of the Confederation who wished to request
one, as long as no legal grounds stood in the way. 72 This provision was
clearly intended to facilitate movement by guaranteeing subjects of the
Confederation access to travel documents they might have felt would be
useful, even if they were not required. Moreover, the proposed law man-
dated that the costs associated with the issuance of a passport should not
exceed the modest sum of one Thaler, and could indeed be distributed
gratis at the discretion of the issuing state. The bill also envisioned a stan-
dardization of the passport documents used by the various states.

It is worth noting that the right to a passport was granted exclusively
to subjects of the Confederation. The failure to mention any terms upon
which foreigners might gain access to German passports - though in
fact they continued to do so - suggests that the interstate system of
movement controls was taking more coherent shape as a framework
regulating the movements of stricdy demarcated bodies of citizens
defined by their legal nationality. Less and less frequently would persons
travel in alien territories with papers issued by another state than that of
which they were nationals.

Finally, echoing the provisions of the 1865 Passport Treaty, the
bill reserved to the presiding authority of the Confederation
(Bundesprdsidium) the right to reinstitute passport controls temporarily
in the event that "the security of the Confederation or of an individual
member state, or the public order, appears threatened by war, internal
unrest, or other developments." The authors of the commentary on the
bill regarded it as "inappropriate" (unthunlich) to attempt to list these
various possible "developments" specifically, a fact that would goad the
civil-libertarian proclivities of several parliamentarians when the bill
came up for discussion in parliament.

The authors of the new law observed that, because some of the signa-
tories of the 1865 Passport Treaty were now members of the North
German Confederation, the Confederation needed to develop a pass-
port policy that met with their assent. The legislators expressed the hope

83

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

that a further agreement could be reached with the south German states
soon after the present proposal had been adopted, resulting in a unifi-
cation of passport law throughout the German lands that would soon
constitute the second German Empire after 1871.

Here the most likely source of potential friction was the North German
law's rejection of special passport obligations for the "dangerous classes"
as had been provided for in the 1865 treaty. Despite the bill's broad simi-
larities with that agreement, in this respect the proposed law went much
further toward liberalizing passport policy than had the treaty. Aside from
expanding the area in which freedom from passport requirements held
sway, therefore, the most important feature of the bill lay in what it did not
do: no groups of the population were singled out as liable to comply with
special passport or visa obligations. This absence of particular restrictions
on the lower orders marked the most significant departure of the 1867 law
from the provisions of the earlier treaty.

The commentary on the bill spoke directly to this conflict between
the two laws. First, the authors noted that the bill's stipulations did not
affect statutes requiring specific occupational groups to equip them-
selves with documents, such as itinerant apprentices with their
Wanderbiicher or domestic servants their Dienstbiicher. To be sure, these
documents could serve the aim of regulating movement. But it was deci-
sive, according to the authors of the bill, that these certificates had not
been originally or mainly intended for this purpose. Rather, possession
of such documents was "in the interest" of the bearer, for they facilitated
the search for work.

This was especially so, the explanation went on, in those cases where
guild organization maintained sway, and the evidence of a years-long
apprenticeship provided by the Wanderbiicher was indispensable for gain-
ing access to the relevant artisanal market. "Likely though it therefore
appears thatjourneymen will continue to carry Wanderbiicher," the legis-
lators saw no need to require them to obtain special documents
authorizing their travel as such:

It would seem completely unjustified, given the general abolition of pass-
port requirements, if one were to make exceptions that would disadvantage
precisely those classes of travelers who have previously been most harassed
by the constant police control of their travel documents, leaving entirely
aside for the moment the effort in time and resources demanded of the
authorities themselves in the face of the very large number of itinerant jour-
neymen and other work-seekers, and which effort is out of all proportion to
the usefulness of those efforts in the individual cases.

Even if the underlying motivation was "Liberal" in the sense of creating
the legal foundations of free-market capitalism, the legislators' explana-
tion of their enterprise bespoke a "liberal," egalitarian intention in the

84

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

area of freedom of movement that bore witness to the coming of that
"equality" that Tocqueville had anticipated would spread across the
world after his trip to America in the early decades of the nineteenth
century. 73 As Tocqueville suggested, it had grown increasingly unaccept-
able to subject the lower classes to special legal disabilities simply as a
result of their social position.

The bill's authors were particularly distressed at the possibility that
the special restrictions of the 1865 passport law concerning "those seek-
ing domestic service or [waged] work" should be extended to the entire
Confederation. Still, if necessary, the authors of the law were prepared
to accept that the exceptions to the general abolition of passport con-
trols enunciated in 1865 could remain provisionally in force in the
southern German states if that proved to be the price of an agreement
on passport policy with them. In this respect, at least, the inhabitants of
southern Germany who mocked the constitution of the North German
Confederation appear to have underestimated the liberal impulses afoot
in the Prussia of their day. 74

At this point, Reichstag deputies were invited to submit proposals
for changes to the bill before its actual discussion. The amendments
tendered mainly concerned three issues: the wording of the guarantee
that the authorities would still have the right to demand that people
"legitimate themselves" and the question whether this authority was a
proper subject of the passport law; the terms under which the govern-
ment could reimpose passport requirements; and the precise nature of
the authority of the municipalities to exclude or expel unwanted per-
sons. With respect to this last issue, Reichstag representative von
Kirchmann proposed that townships should have the right to exclude or
expel their own members only on the basis of a specific legal authoriza-
tion, or if they availed themselves of poor relief; all other rights of the
municipalities were to be abolished. The socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht
suggested an amendment to this amendment that would have struck the
words "their own members." The point, of course, was not to penalize
people for becoming poor, but to limit the power of the local commu-
nity to exclude people, whether they were members of the municipality
in question or not. 75

The Reichstag debate over the law began on 30 September 1867. 76
Dr Friedenthal, the bill's official rapporteur, opened the discussion by
remarking that the purpose of the proposed law was to dispose of obso-
lete legislation that was based on the notion "that removal from one's
place of residence - that is, travel as such, [and] that taking up residence
elsewhere are undertakings which, as a matter of public order, belong
not in realm of the free decision of the individual, but are matters depen-
dent upon an official authorization [emphasis in original] in the form of

85

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

travel documents and residency cards, dependent upon unremitting
police control, a shameful sort of police surveillance that must accom-
pany the traveler without cease . . ." Friedenthal took it for granted that
there could be "no differences of opinion regarding the need to dis-
pose" of this sort of control, and that the debate could turn only on
four issues: (1) whether the law provided sufficient guarantees for the
freedom of movement; (2) the relation of the law to the right of the
police to demand that persons "legitimate themselves," "irrespective of
whether these persons are travelers or not [original italics]"; (3) the extent to
which the law transforms the former obligation to carry a passport into a
right to obtain one; and (4) the relation between this law for the entire
Confederation and the laws of the individual states. While the represen-
tatives to the Reichstag did raise a variety of objections to the proposed
law, Friedenthal was basically correct: no one ever challenged the funda-
mental aims of the law, and it was ultimately adopted in precisely the
form in which it had first been submitted.

Noting that the passport bill before the house constituted an improve-
ment "in the direction of greater liberty" over the Passport Treaty of 1865,
Friedenthal affirmed that the law did, indeed, represent an adequate
guarantee of the individual's freedom of movement. He found the
renewed guarantee of the police authority to demand that people identify
themselves hardly in need of further justification; it simply went without
saying that the state had to have some way of "embracing" those unknown
to its agents. As for the third issue, that of the bill's creation of a right to a
passport, Friedenthal found this a "particular advantage" of the law, a
right "of the greatest value for the working classes." Finally, Friedenthal
framed the matter of the relation of the confederal law to those of the
individual states precisely in terms of the matter of a right to a passport.
This right was limited only by "legal obstacles" to the issuance of a pass-
port. The individual states would be free to determine what these might
be, but "it is certainly desirable . . . that there be no room for doubt that it
is not a matter of the whim of the authorities wherein consist the legal
obstacles." Friedenthal further applauded the freedom of the various
states to determine for themselves which officials would be authorized to
issue passports, particularly including local officials closer to the needs
and problems of passport applicants. Finally, he stressed the importance
of making travel documents cheap and easily accessible to the working
classes, which in turn would help prevent official abuse of the provision
authorizing the police to check personal identities.

In view of the bill's advantages for the working classes, a representa-
tive from Dortmund named Dr Becker declared himself unwilling to
postpone "for even a day more than is absolutely necessary" the adop-
tion of the law as written. For

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THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

this law transforms the worker's duty (Pflicht), when he no longer finds
work in the place where he normally resides, to seek work elsewhere, into
his right and his matter of honor. It is a horrible contradiction in the exist-
ing legislation that the worker is threatened with disadvantages for his
unemployment and neediness, and, when he seeks work, is subjected to a
scrupulous police surveillance which, if he ignores it, puts him in danger
of being punished as a vagabond and of suffering damage to his property,
his honor, and his self-esteem.

Despite all the lofty talk about the worker's "honor," one senses the
effusions of a would-be employer of cheap labor power behind Becker's
enthusiasm for the passport law. It is not clear whether the repeated
references to a male worker were simply a function of German grammar,
in which the pronoun for the worker ( der Arbeiter) is necessarily trans-
formed into a "he" (er), or whether Becker was simply blind to the
gender implications of the bill. Yet the vast majority of those seeking
domestic service (Dienst, as opposed to Arbeit) - the other group from
whom restrictions were to be lifted - were surely women. 77 In all events,
Becker was eager to get his fellow parliamentarians to adopt the new
passport law in order to dispense with the bureaucratic arbitrariness
under which the laboring masses suffered: "Gentlemen, here we are
beginning to sweep out a great Augeas's stable of police ordinances."

This the Reichstag proceeded to do after only relatively minor spar-
ring. One of the highlights of the debate came when the Marxian
socialist, Wilhelm Liebknecht, who rose to defend a proposed ban on
expulsions from Germany, whether the person concerned was German
or foreign. 78 In a role that would become common among socialists,
Liebknecht sought to defend general human rights against the rights
granted by nation-states only to their own subjects. He began by chiding
the authoritarian practice whereby Prussia until that time had felt free
to expel any non-Prussian German, without the need to justify that
action on legal grounds. If the Reichstag did not explicitly abolish this
practice, Liebknecht continued,

we will be giving the police the right over a larger area . . . over the territory
of the entire North German Confederation, to expel as "foreigners" those
Germans who are not subjects of the North German Confederation - such
as Austrian Germans, who despite the terms of the Peace of Nikolsburg [i.e.,
the Prague Treaty that ended the war with Austria after the battle of
Koniggratz (1866)] still belong to Germany, Wurttemberger, Badenese, etc.
I think that those gentlemen who call themselves the national party par excel-
lence will not object if those Germans who are subjects of German states but
not of the North German Confederation are assigned the same rights as
those of the North German Confederation. Indeed, it is necessary to
expand this right even further. A right that does not exist for all is no right
. . . Gentlemen, it is necessary for us to proceed in the same fashion that
England, that free country, has already taken, and to extend to foreigners

87

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

the same right that exists for Englishmen. There is no such thing as police
expulsion in England; the government there does not have the right to
deny someone their place of residence . . . Gentlemen, it is necessary that
that be introduced here as well, that the police system, whose extensive
development in the state of Prussia has done more to undermine German
unity than any other institution - a system that has facilitated the politics of
blood and iron to which we owe the disastrous war of last year, to which we
owe the fact that Germany is now so riven and so powerless externally.

At this point in Liebknecht's stirring critique, the chamber grew restive.
The president of the assembly moved to close debate on the paragraph,
but this failed to carry.

Then Eduard Lasker, a member of the National Liberal party who was
one of the outstanding parliamentarians of the era as well as "a constant
thorn in [Bismarck's] side," 79 rose to support Liebknecht's position.
Lasker admonished the Reichstag that "it is a barbarity to make a distinc-
tion between foreigners and the indigenous (Einheimischen) in the right
to hospitable residence ( in dent gastlichen Rechte des Aufenthalts) . Not only
every German, but every human being has the right not to be chased
away like a dog." Because the representatives of the Prussian govern-
ment had repeatedly indicated that they were opposed to the practice of
police expulsions, Lasker said, he felt confident that the government
would endorse his view of these matters. Yet Liebknecht's amendment
failed along with the one to which it was attached. Ultimately, the law
was adopted essentially as originally proposed. 80

As a result, the North German Confederation had moved to decrimi-
nalize travel - to remove from that act the suspicion and police
surveillance that had previously attended it, especially for the lower
classes. By abolishing passport controls and simultaneously reaffirming
the right of the state authorities to be in a position to embrace all persons,
whether travelers or not, movement as such now came to be legally
regarded as a normal aspect of daily life. The law powerfully promoted the
shift from documentary controls on movement to documentary substanti-
ation of identity that would soon gain ground across Europe, but without
yet privileging nationals over non-nationals with respect to who was sub-
ject to these regulations. In the discussion about the clause in the law
reasserting the state's authority to demand that people "legitimate them-
selves," Count zu Eulenburg, later to be Minister of the Interior in the
Empire, summarized the matter succincdy: "The purpose of this para-
graph is to put travelers on an equal legal footing with all other citizens." 81

BROADER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE 1867 LAW

The Prussian-German ancien regimewas collapsing fast. Freedom to travel,
to move about unhindered and without explicit state authorization, had

88

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

been established as the law of the land. The Confederation deepened its
commitment to such liberty only three weeks later when the Reichstag
adopted a law guaranteeing freedom of setdement (Freiziigigkeit) to its
subjects. 82 The law provided for the right to setde and acquire property
anywhere a person wished in the territory constituting the Confederation,
irrespective of religion or lack of previous municipal or state membership,
without being subjected to special disabilities by the authorities in either
their place of origin or their new residence. Moreover, subjects of the
Confederation were to be at liberty to practice any trade, whether seden-
tary or itinerant, under the same conditions as those to which the
indigenous residents were subject.

Just as important as these measures was the fact that the rights of
municipalities to deny residency to persons were almost entirely abol-
ished. The law shifted this authority "outward" to the level of the
constituent states of the Confederation, which were free to exclude per-
sons - such as convicted criminals, vagabonds, and beggars - at their
borders. Building on the earlier Prussian prohibition on the right of the
municipalities to refuse entry to those they feared might, at some later
date, become poor, municipalities throughout the Confederation were
now left with the authority to exclude only the currently poor - and the
law mandated that states could limit even this authority if they chose to
do so. The connection in these laws between freedom of movement and
the elimination of local restrictions on access to poor relief suggests that
the fabled Bismarckian social insurance legislation of the late 1870s had
as much to do with the creation of a unified national labor market as
with efforts to take the wind out of the sails of a rapidly maturing social-
ist labor movement.

Indeed, recent research has demonstrated persuasively that "the
working class was a minor player in the creation of the welfare state" in
Germany. 83 This judgment seems copiously confirmed by the debate
over the 1867 Passport Law, through which the German political elite
"liberated" workers in search of work "in their own interest," rather than
in response to their demands. Even though freedom of movement was
intrinsically connected to the eventual creation of the German national
welfare state, it also went hand in hand with other liberal freedoms such
as the destruction of guilds and the corresponding freedom of entry
into all occupations (Gewerbefreiheit) , a connection that contributed to
the hostility of artisans toward liberalism and to their later support for
reactionary anti-capitalist movements. 84

The law on passports adopted by the North German Confederation
in 1867 - which was crucially bound up with broader Prussian-led efforts
to institute the legal preconditions for industrial capitalism in Germany,
especially including a free market in labor - came at a time when fears of

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

the working class were comparatively mild. Radicalism had been deci-
mated after 1848, and despite Tocqueville's prescient warnings about
the rising political salience of the "social question," 85 socialism as an
organized movement remained in its infancy. 86 Despite the lingering
fears of revolution that hung in the air even after 1848 had been
reduced to a memory, these factors helped to provide a "window of
opportunity" through which the remarkably liberal 1867 law slipped. As
the socialist movement gathered force, however, the government in
1878 - the same year as the so-called "socialist law" that banned socialist
parties - took advantage of the provision for reimposing passport
requirements when public order was threatened, and required that all
"outsiders" (Fremde) and newly arrived persons in the Imperial capital be
equipped with a passport or "pass card" "until further notice." 87

It is also worth emphasizing that the passport policy adopted in 1867
by the Prussian-led North German Confederation was considerably
more progressive than the 1865 treaty between Saxony, Bavaria,
Hamburg, and Wurttemberg on which it largely was based. The 1867
passport law sharply differed from the treaty in ways that reflected the
Prussian state's stronger commitment to economic liberalism. In view of
Prussia's fabled reputation for persistendy reactionary political and eco-
nomic attitudes, this result may surprise. In fact, however, this finding is
consistent with recent research that has demonstrated persuasively that
the political and economic impulses of the Prussian state during this
period were deeply "bourgeois" - even if those impulses were articulated
by Junker aristocrats rather than card-carrying members of the middle
classes. 88 The removal of passport restrictions on movement, and its
contribution to the creation of a larger space in which a common citi-
zenship held sway, was in all events part of that "revolution from above"
that "cumulatively established the conditions of possibility for the devel-
opment of industrial capitalism" in Germany. 89

Yet it must always be borne in mind that the "unification of Germany"
and the creation of a Second Empire that took place under Bismarck's
tutelage did not result in the creation of a "German nation-state" if that
is to mean a state exclusively "of and for" all Germans. The German
Kaiserreich was both too small and too large to fill that bill. As a result of
the Prussian conflict with Austria that had come to a head at the Battle
of Koniggratz (1866), Bismarck settled for a "little-German solution"
(kleindeutsche Losung) to the problem of territorial unification - a solu-
tion that excluded those parts of Austria that had belonged to the first
(Holy Roman) Empire, but included Prussian acquisitions in Poland
that had never been part of that earlier entity. From the perspective of
the territory it did include, the Empire held a variety of ethnic minori-

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THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TREND TOWARD FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

ties, such as Poles, Danes, Sorbs, and Alsatians, who were not "German"
by most people's reckoning, perhaps least of all their own.

Moreover, the state itself lacked the centralized, uniform administra-
tive structure that the French revolutionaries had built, completing the
work of the ancien regime. The federated states retained substantial
autonomy in a variety of matters, even including the use of military
force. Municipalities, moreover, maintained significant independence
in a number of policy areas, including social policy. These qualifications,
however, have hardly inhibited both contemporaries and subsequent
commentators from speaking of the Second Empire as the achievement
(however "belated") of the "German national state," thus contributing
to the notion that such a thing exists - what Steinmetz has suggestively
referred to as "the nation-state effect." 90

The "long nineteenth century" bore witness to an increasing freedom of
movement for the lower orders of society, who were liberated from the
feudal shackles that had once bound them to their birthplaces. The
expansion of legal mobility for the popular classes generated tension in
arrangements for poor relief that presumed domicile as the foundation
of access to benefits, provoking the need to codify the criteria for
belonging. In order to develop national markets, German economic
and political elites strove to expand the limits of citizenship to the
"national" level. This process presupposed the abrogation of local com-
munity rights to restrict the entry of "co-nationals" that had been rooted
in their traditional obligations to provide poor relief. At the same time,
it entailed a democratization of legal standing, so that the "internal
foreign nation" comprising the lower classes had to be elevated to at
least a legal par with their social "betters."

Nonetheless, developments in Germany had signaled a broader
European shift toward greater freedom of entry and exit, even for
foreigners. Under the influence of an "overwhelming consensus" during
the 1860s and early 1870s that economic liberalism was the surest recipe
for prosperity, as Hobsbawm has put it, "the remaining institutional
barriers to the free movement of the factors of production, to free enter-
prise and to anything which could conceivably hamper its profitable
operation, fell before a world-wide onslaught." 91 In England, the passport
provisions of the 1836 Aliens Restriction Act went largely unregarded
until the Aliens Act of 1905 revived them. Indeed, Lord Granville wrote
in 1872 that "by the existing law of Great Britain all foreigners have the
unrestricted right of entrance into and residence in this country," 92
substantiating the view of the situation in England offered by Wilhelm
Liebknecht during the Reichstag debate over the 1867 passport law.

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

Similarly, in France, with the exception of the period of the Paris
Commune, the once-severe passport controls on internal movement had
become "entombed in desuetude," although the persistence of the livret
until the end of the nineteenth century surely discriminated against
the movements of many a humble work-seeker. 93 The enforcement of
passport controls on those entering and exiting the country had similarly
been allowed to lapse, not to be rejuvenated until the Great War. 94

These developments came together under the ideological aegis of
economic liberalism, which however held no strong brief for the sanctity
of national borders. The result of this extraordinary conjuncture was
that passport requirements fell away throughout Western Europe,
useless paper barriers to a world in prosperous motion. In the course of
defending the widening right to freedom of movement in nineteenth-
century Europe, an Italian legal commentator, Giovanni Bolis, wrote in
1871 that "the surest thermometer of the freedom of a people is to be
found in an examination of its legislation concerning passports." Bolis
strongly advocated the elimination of international passports "not
merely as a homage to the civility of the times . . . but as a measure of
great importance for economic relations, favoring commerce, industry,
and progress, facilitating the relations among the various countries, and
liberating travelers from harassment and hindrances." 95 Bolis's remarks
constitute a quintessential statement of the liberal attitude toward free-
dom of movement that came to prevail in Europe around this time.

Yet states' insistence that they be able to embrace mobile populations
resulted in a heightened preoccupation with identification documents
that allowed governments and police forces to establish who (and
"what") a person was when they wished to do so. With democratization,
identification of all became more important than controlling move-
ments as such.

92

CHAPTER 4

TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF
NATION": THE PROLIFERATION OF
IDENTIFICATION DOCUMENTS FROM
THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO
THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Despite the generally liberal attitude toward freedom of movement that
carried the day in Europe during the late nineteenth century, govern-
ments became increasingly oriented to making distinctions between
their own citizens/subjects and others, a distinction that could be made
only on the basis of documents. At first this concern was typically
directed at specific groups of undesirable outsiders, but it gradually
spread and became a general trait of ever more socially integrated
"national" societies. Thus despite the fact that the period from the late
nineteenth century until the First World War has been frequently viewed
as an unexampled era of free movement in the modern age, the period
also saw the spread of various kinds of identification documents that
sharpened the line between national and alien and thereby contributed
to what has aptly been called the "naturalization of nativism." 1

In the United States, for example, which had been more or less open
to free movement for the white population, the development of pass-
ports and identification documents grew dramatically toward the end of
the nineteenth century. As elsewhere, the ultimate result would be to
promote the institutionalization of documentary controls designed to
regulate movement and to distinguish clearly between nationals and
others. As the preferred destination of enormous numbers of migrants
from around the world during this period, the posture of the United
States played a crucial role in the shift toward more rigorous and
bureaucratic mechanisms for regulating movement.

PASSPORT CONTROLS AND STATE DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED
STATES

The United States' experience with passports, and with immigration
controls more generally, reflected the weak, diffuse character of the

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

American state itself before the late nineteenth century. There has never
been much concern about the issue of emigration from the United
States, as there had been from mercantilist European countries. And
although the opposition to immigration in nineteenth-century America
was greater than is widely believed, restraints on entry into the United
States during most of the century tended to be haphazard and indirect.
The Alien Act of 1798, the first serious breach in the policy of openness
to European immigrants, aimed to complicate the settlement of foreign
radicals on American soil. Arising in the context of the French
Revolution and its aftershocks, the Act was a response to fears of alien
subversion - especially from French and Irish sources - that drew its
inspiration from the first Aliens Bill in England in 1793. 2 Yet the law had
little impact on the course of immigration to the United States.

The first effort to deal with immigration as a national concern in the
United States emerged in 1819, when Congress adopted legislation
(modeled on the British Passenger Acts) to restrict the number of per-
sons that could be carried in transatlantic passage. Although the backers
of the measure indicated that their purpose was to improve overcrowded
conditions on the passenger ships, the law had restrictive effects that
may have been unintentional but not necessarily undesirable. Perhaps
more important in the long run, at the same time that the federal gov-
ernment assumed greater responsibility for supervising the commerce
in passengers, it also instituted its first official statistics on immigration.
As Zolberg has pointed out, the advent of federal immigration record-
keeping "constituted both a symbolic extension of the domain of state
concern and a foundation for the potential exercise of further regula-
tion when circumstances changed." 3 The law thus laid some of the
essential early groundwork for the bureaucratic administration of immi-
gration regulation in the United States. The ability of the state to count
would-be immigrants would prove to be a critical feature of its capacity
to restrict their entry, especially when immigrants' national origins came
to play a key role in determining their eligibility for admission.

Still, before the Civil War much of the regulation of immigration
remained within the purview of the individual states of the Union. In
addition to the federal limitations on passenger numbers relative to
deck space on boats, a number of states imposed requirements that ship-
masters and ship owners post bonds against the possibility that their
passengers would fall on the public purse after their arrival. By driving
up the costs of passage, these measures impinged upon the business of
those involved in passenger-carrying enterprises, leading shippers to
challenge these laws in the courts as a restraint of trade. In response to
these legal challenges, in which ship owners insisted that they should
not be forced to assume responsibility for their human cargo, "the

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TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

Supreme Court in 1837 upheld state provisions requiring the master of
a ship to submit a detailed report on the passengers, ruling that the
states had a right to know who was coming within their boundaries." 4 In
the process, the Court also effectively endorsed the continued primacy
of the states over the federal government in determining immigration
laws. A decade later, however, the Supreme Court reversed this holding
in the 1848 Passenger Cases, in which it found that states' head taxes on
passengers was an unconstitutional infringement on the federal prerog-
ative of regulating foreign commerce. 5

The federal government further strengthened its jurisdiction over
migration matters in 1856, when Congress asserted the exclusive right to
issue passports and mandated that they should be issued only to American
citizens. Before that time, no federal statute governed the granting of
passports. While the Department of State typically assumed this responsi-
bility, the individual states and even municipalities had frequently
distributed them as well. Despite the issuance of Department of State cir-
culars informing applicants that passports issued by lower-level authorities
would not be recognized by foreign governments, the lack of any legal
provision for the granting of passports led to "impositions . . . upon the
illiterate and unwary by the fabrication of worthless passports." 6

The issuance of passports — essentially, documents attesting citizen-
ship - by state and local authorities before 1856 reflects the accuracy of
the holding that, during the antebellum period, the central government
of the United States had "only a token administrative presence in most
of the nation and [its] sovereignty was interpreted by the central admin-
istration as contingent on the consent of the individual states." 7 The law
mandating exclusive federal control over the issuance of passports was
adopted amid increasingly grave sectional tensions that led to intensi-
fied efforts to establish the dominance of central government authority. 8
While the assertion of that control may have suggested growing state
coherence, however, the failure of North and South to reconcile their
respective social systems soon plunged the United States into its bloodi-
est and most destructive conflagration.

The Civil War was a war of political and economic unification as well as
a "war to save the Union" (Lincoln), 9 and it is thus not entirely surprising
to find that developments analogous to those afoot in Germany were tak-
ing place almost simultaneously in the Reconstruction-era United States. A
year after the North German Confederation moved to "decriminalize
travel" and create a more coherent space of free movement within its bor-
ders, an 1868 decision of the US Supreme Court struck down a Nevada tax
on every person leaving the state by means of public transportation. The
justices' ruling derived from the argument that the right to travel from
state to state was a right of national citizenship 10 - a status just then being

95

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

conferred upon the country's former slave population by the Fourteenth
Amendment. The Supreme Court's holding helped insure the right of
Americans to move freely throughout the country. Within only a decade
or so after the Supreme Court widened the basis of American citizenship
and affirmed that that status afforded its bearers freedom of movement
across US territory, however, the government would begin to restrict free
access to the country to many who arrived on its shores - a process that
coincided loosely with the "closing of the frontier." 11

After the Civil War, business elements hungry for labor power devel-
oped a growing appetite for overseas sources of labor, in part to combat
strikes staged by burgeoning trade unions. The unions were dominated
by whites who represented the dominant Anglo-German as well as Irish
stock, and sought to protect the interests of these white ethnic workers.
Employers on the West Coast, for their part, increasingly warmed to the
prospect of recruiting non-whites who were generally thought to be able
to survive on less than native white workers. As the war came to an end,
European immigration exploded, reaching its nineteenth-century
zenith in 1882 as transportation improved and transatlantic passage
became cheaper. 12 Yet immigrants from a less familiar source began to
arrive in growing numbers on the newly conquered Western flank of the
spreading American republic, provoking the ire of various native whites.

PAPER WALLS: PASSPORTS AND CHINESE EXCLUSION

Around the time of the Civil War, political developments and a series of
violent upheavals in China had made it both more appealing and more
possible to leave that country, developments that fueled interest in emi-
gration to the western United States. Against this background the
United States and the Chinese imperial government concluded the
Burlingame Treaty of 1868, under which the Chinese were permitted to
immigrate freely into the country without, however, any corresponding
right to become naturalized American citizens. Because they were
barred from inclusion in the US body politic, the Chinese admitted
under the Treaty were, in effect, early versions of what came to be known
as "guestworkers" during the post-Second World War era in Europe. Yet
despite the legal disabilities involved, Chinese streamed into the country
in substantial numbers in the ensuing years. 13

Within a mere fifteen years, however, the stance of the American gov-
ernment toward Chinese immigration - and indeed toward immigration
generally - would begin to shift dramatically. In 1880, the Chinese and
American governments signed another treaty granting the United States
the right to limit the entry of Chinese whenever such immigration
"affects or threatens to affect" American interests. The United States

96

TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

thus reversed the terms of a treaty allowing the untrammeled influx of
Chinese labor that it had so eagerly sought little more than a decade
before. Two years later, the United States adopted the first of the
Chinese Exclusion Acts, barring the importation of Chinese contract
labor for ten years. Congress subsequently renewed the law several times
and extended it to other Asian groups; the statutory exclusion of the
Chinese only came to an end with the American extension of a wartime
courtesy to its Chinese ally during the Second World War. 14

The State Department objected to the Chinese exclusion law as an
abrogation of the Burlingame Treaty and as an irritant in Chinese-
American affairs. Such protests on the part of ministries of foreign rela-
tions were, in fact, typical during this period, because anti-immigrant
measures undermined established notions of reciprocity among nations
and of the treatment that states expected for their nationals abroad. 15
With rising anti-Chinese violence in the Western United States, however,
the State Department reversed its position with the reasoning "that vio-
lating the [Burlingame] treaty would offend China less than allowing its
subjects to be lynched." In the same year, the US government adopted
the Immigration Act of 1882, which extended earlier state laws to
exclude convicts, lunatics, idiots, and persons likely to become public
charges. 16 While the prohibition on the entry of these groups was any-
thing but novel, the federal effort to restrict a particular racial/national
group was a notable departure: "In making a distinction based on race
and nationality, the act augured a significant new era in federal legisla-
tion and American attitudes toward immigrants." 17

Here I want to focus on the administrative implementation of the
Chinese Exclusion Act, for it constituted the first serious attempt in
American history specifically to exclude members of a particular group
whose relevant characteristics were knowable only on the basis of docu-
ments. 18 In order to make sense of the various documentary requirements
associated with the enforcement of the exclusion law, it must be borne in
mind that the 1882 law barred only newly entering laborers; those who
had entered the US at least ninety days before the Act took effect were per-
mitted to remain. In addition, while the Chinese were not allowed to
naturalize, court decisions had recognized as American citizens those who
were born on US soil. 19 Moreover, the Act exempted other groups such as
merchants, teachers, students, and travelers. Because the Chinese had pre-
viously been welcomed into the United States and many were in the
country legally, the new law made it critical that they be able to establish
that they had a right to remain in the United States or to reenter if they left
- conditions that could only be met by recourse to documents. In order to
sort out the eligibles from the ineligibles, the measure thus mandated "an
elaborate system of registration, certification and identification." 20

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

First among these provisions was that Chinese laborers legitimately in
the United States under the terms of the Act who wished to leave the
country were required to obtain a certificate of identification - also
known as a "return certificate" - from the collector of the port prior to
their departure. The collectors of the ports, not immigration officers per
se, were thus authorized to distribute the document that established
Chinese residents' right to reenter the country, and to determine
whether any Chinese were entering the country legally under the terms
of the law: in short, they assumed the duties of immigration inspectors.
In addition, all Chinese from the exempt categories, other than diplo-
matic personnel, were required to have in their possession a certificate
from the Chinese government upon entering the country - a "Canton"
or Section Six certificate, which derived its name from the relevant
provision in the 1882 law. The various Chinese Exclusion Acts did not
specify whether women and children were admissible. Some judges held
that their status was determined by their own qualifications, so that they
were required to have a Section Six certificate of their own, whereas
other judges maintained that the status of women and children followed
that of the husband or father. The dispute was not finally resolved until
1900, when the Supreme Court upheld the latter position, ascribing to
the wives and children of Chinese men the same immigration status as
the husband/father. When the Chinese challenged the documentary
requirements imposed upon them, the ensuing disputes were settled in
the courts - often in favor of the Chinese rather than the customs offi-
cials who enforced the law, a fact that tended to mitigate its severity. 21

Chinese objections to the certificate requirements notwithstanding,
California politicians insisted that the administration of the Exclusion
Act was having all the inhibitory power of a large-gauge sieve and
demanded a more vigorous enforcement of its provisions. These
demands resulted in the passage in 1884 of an amendment that tight-
ened the documentary requirements imposed upon the Chinese. In an
effort to preclude the frequent claims of laborers that they had left the
country before the advent of the "return certificates," the new law
mandated an end to exceptions concerning the stricture that all return-
ing laborers originally in the country legitimately had to have such a
certificate or be denied reentry. When the Chinese challenged this
clause, however, the Supreme Court ruled that laborers should be
readmitted who could prove by means other than the certificate of iden-
tification that they resided in the United States lawfully under the terms
of the Act.

In addition to the tighter restrictions on laborers, the 1884 law also
sought to firm up the definition of and the documentary controls on
exempt categories of Chinese:

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TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

[T]he word 'merchant' was defined to exclude hucksters, peddlers, and
fishermen engaged in drying and shipping fish; the traveler's certificate
must state where he proposed to travel and his financial standing; the cer-
tificates of identification from the Chinese Government must be verified
as to facts and visaed by the United States diplomatic officer at the port of
departure, [in order] to be prima facie evidence of right of re-entry . . , 22

This last procedure constituted an early version of that system of
"remote control" - involving passports and visas stamped at the emi-
grants' point of departure by consular officials of the destination
country - that Aristide Zolberg has appropriately characterized as a deci-
sive feature of immigration regulation after the Great War. For all
Zolberg's perspicacity about the dynamics of Chinese exclusion and the
development of "remote border control" during the 1920s, however, he
overlooks the fact that the latter was first experimented with in the effort
to exclude the Chinese, not Europeans - the main target after the First
World War.

Despite the greater stringency of documentary requirements and
despite official findings that the exclusion law had led to a significant
drop in the number of Chinese in the United States, further efforts to
keep them out arose in the late 1880s. On 13 September 1888 Congress
adopted a law denying reentry into the country of Chinese laborers who
had returned to visit China unless they had a wife, child, or parent in the
United States, or owned at least $1000 of property. Shortly thereafter,
when a project to draft a new treaty relating to Chinese immigration
floundered, the Scott Act excluded any Chinese laborer then outside
the United States who had not returned to the country before the
passage of the Act, prohibited the issuance of any more certificates
under the terms of the 1882 law, and voided all those previously issued.
Thus no Chinese laborer who left the United States would have the right
to return any longer, and some 20 000 certificates guaranteeing Chinese
reentry into the US were nullified. Net arrivals of Chinese fell sharply
during the following year. 23

The Chinese quickly mounted legal challenges to these restrictions,
however. Just one week after the passage of the Scott Act, a Chinese
laborer named Chae Chan Ping returned to San Francisco from a visit to
China and requested reentry on presentation of his certificate of identifi-
cation. In consequence of the new law, he was refused admission into the
country. Chae Chan Ping challenged the constitutionality of the law,
asserting that Congress had no authority to exclude aliens. The case went
all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the constitutionality of
the Act, though not on the customary grounds that Congress had the
authority to regulate foreign commerce. Instead, the Court held that the
Constitution granted Congress a variety of powers that made it sovereign

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

in the land, and "any independent nation must have 'jurisdiction over its
own territory,' including the power to exclude aliens, if it were to be truly
sovereign." 24 This holding contrasted sharply with Lord Granville's view,
stated only fifteen years earlier, that aliens were free to enter the United
Kingdom at will, as well as with the general climate of relatively free
movement that had taken hold in Europe during this period.

The severe strictures of the Scott Act notwithstanding, agitation
against the Chinese - especially among politicians from the Pacific coast
states - continued unabated. The exclusionists complained that the
appropriations and machinery for identifying and deporting Chinese
were inadequate, and during the run-up to the 1892 presidential
election California Congressman Thomas Geary proposed a new law
designed to strengthen the measures precluding or eliminating the
Chinese from American society. Among the provisions of his proposed
law was one that required Chinese residents to register themselves and
to obtain an identification certificate including a photograph to forestall
misuse and falsification. As ultimately adopted, the law called for all
Chinese laborers to obtain certificates within one year, and, if arrested,
imposed upon the Chinese themselves the burden of demonstrating
their legitimate presence in the country.

The Chinese Minister in Washington and the Consul-General in San
Francisco, as well as Chinese representatives in Peking, protested vehe-
mendy against the law. These objections were joined by those of the
Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in San Francisco - perhaps
better known as the Chinese Six Companies - the major organization rep-
resenting the interests of Chinese in the United States, which held that
the Act was unconstitutional and advised the Chinese not to comply with
its registration provisions. As the period within which registration was to
have been completed approached its close, Representative McCreary of
Kentucky noted that so far only 13 242 out of 106 668 Chinese had actu-
ally registered, and proposed an extension of the registration period.
Defending his bill, Congressman Geary replied that "it was impossible to
identify Chinamen," and California Senator White insisted that the
Chinese had to be photographed as well as registered. Their California
colleague, Representative Maguire, said the Geary law was "not a deporta-
tion but a registration law, merely a passport system . . ."To these sorts of
objections McCreary responded that it was unnecessary further to violate
the treaty with China by requiring the Chinese "to be tagged, marked, and
photographed."

In the end, however, the registration system was adopted largely as orig-
inally proposed, and the federal government expanded the facilities for
registration and sent officers directly to encampments of Chinese to expe-
dite the process. Mary Coolidge, a thoughtful and diligent early student of

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TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

Chinese immigration to the United States, concluded: "Thus, at last, was
set in operation at great expense, a system of registration which the offi-
cials in charge of the execution of every act since 1882, had declared to be
indispensable to effective administration" of Chinese exclusion. 25 Indeed,
the various identification certificates inspired by the exclusion laws, which
functioned as the equivalent of passports for those wishing to gain entry
into the United States during the period in which the exclusion laws were
in effect, continued to play an important role in the administration of
Chinese exclusion for years to come.

THE "NATIONALIZATION" OF IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION IN THE
UNITED STATES

During the same period when the law had come to impose strict docu-
mentary surveillance on the Chinese in response to the wishes of
political interests in the Western states of the country, the regulation of
immigration was becoming more and more clearly understood as a man-
date of the federal government in the United States. Hearings by joint
congressional committees to determine the goals of US immigration
policy had led to recommendations aiming "not to restrict immigration,
but to sift it, to separate the desirable from the undesirable immigrants,
and to permit only those to land on our shores who have certain physical
and moral qualities." 26 In pursuit of this objective, immigration regula-
tion came to focus on those who might be a burden on the public purse
and those regarded as "unassimilable" or otherwise unworthy of inclu-
sion in the American civic body.

Against this background, Congress adopted the Immigration Act
of 1891, which placed the regulation of immigration under the authority
of the Secretary of the Treasury, created a new Superintendent of
Immigration within the Treasury Department, strengthened the
enforcement provisions of earlier laws, and installed twenty-four border
inspection stations. All of these measures contributed to the bureau-
cratic institutionalization of immigration control, which for the first
time had become national in character as a consequence of this legisla-
tion. Yet for the time being, Chinese immigration continued to be
regulated by the Exclusion Acts, whereas that from Europe was gov-
erned by the Superintendent of Immigration - a fact that, ironically,
allowed the Chinese more leeway to challenge their treatment in the
courts. 27

In keeping with the recommendations of the congressional inquiries
into the aims of American immigration policy, the administrative struc-
tures called forth by the 1891 law were designed to enable the
government to distinguish between those who were thought to be good

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

candidates for American citizenship, and those who were not. These pri-
orities promoted a process whereby all immigration would be
administered by the same bureaucracy (even if different groups of poten-
tial immigrants were subjected to different policies). With the increasing
prevalence of eugenics and other race-conscious approaches to popula-
tion management, the ranks of those held to be unworthy of admission
into or citizenship in the United States expanded beyond the Chinese to
include a variety of groups regarded as impure, unclean, idiotic, non-
white, or incapable of understanding the principles of republicanism.
The proliferation of the categories of excludables pushed in the direction
of a more uniform administration of immigration control, and in the
early 1900s the separate administration of Asian and European immi-
grant streams disappeared as the drift toward the "nationalization" of
immigration regulation became consolidated institutionally.

In 1903, the work of the Commissioner General of Immigration in
the Treasury Department was transferred to a full-fledged Bureau of
Immigration in the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor,
and Chinese immigration fell under its purview along with that of
Europeans. The exclusion of the Chinese was rendered permanent in
1904, a harbinger of things to come for other Asian and European
national groups - as long as the necessary documents could be created
and imposed. In 1907, the "Gentlemen's Agreement" closed off the
access of Japanese laborers to the United States when the Japanese gov-
ernment agreed to stop issuing them passports, a policy later extended
to Japanese women who were to travel to the United States as "picture
brides" of future husbands whom they knew only as a photograph. The
situation was more complicated with Filipinos, subjects but not citizens
of the United States after acquisition of the islands from Spain. As US
"nationals" - persons "owing allegiance, whether citizens or not, to the
United States" - they could not be subjected to restrictive immigration
laws. Ironically, however, the acquisition of overseas possessions such as
the Philippines forced the US government to expand access to passports
to a variety of non-citizen "nationals," reversing the general trend toward
distribution of those documents exclusively to citizens. 28

Along with the growing worries about the racially inferior, concerns
also spread that various categories of persons would render the
American stock less wholesome in political, moral, or medical terms.
The latter fear soon helped give birth to the Public Health Service and
to legislation excluding those with contagious illnesses. US restrictions
on the admission of the medically dubious stimulated the development
overseas of both governmental and steamship company efforts to insure
that would-be emigrants would pass muster when they arrived in
American ports. 29 Gradually, many of the activities associated with US

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TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

immigrant inspection would be transferred abroad, as control of immi-
gration moved from the territorial borders of the United States to the
emigrant-sending countries themselves - a development that would dra-
matically enhance the capacity of states to restrict the influx of outsiders.

SOVEREIGNTY AND DEPENDENCE: THE ITALIAN PASSPORT LAW OF 1901

The installation of the medical inspection facilities of one country on
the territory of another was just one example of the way in which any
strong conception of state sovereignty had to be modified in the course
of achieving states' monopolization of the legitimate means of move-
ment. Just as there were often "external" determinants of emigrant
health inspection, and indeed of citizenship laws that might be thought
to be at the very heart of state sovereignty, 30 passport requirements
might be imposed in one state as a result of the restrictions laid down by
another. Such was the case with the Italian passport law of 1901.

The passport law of 1901, which remained the major legislation on
passports until 1967, appeared to be a departure from the widespread
warm feelings toward the freedom of movement in Europe at that time.
Certainly its detractors regarded its requirement that transoceanic trav-
elers be in possession of a passport before purchasing their steamer
tickets as the reintroduction of a noxious restraint on exit. The provision
smacked of supposedly outmoded restraints on emigration typical of the
pre-liberal period, and liberal and leftist parliamentarians strongly
opposed it. The opponents of the law presumably knew that big
landowners tended to oppose emigration because they feared that
depopulation would drive up the wages they had to pay. 31

In fact, however, the legislation arose not from an urge to choke off
exit, but rather from a desire to insure that Italian emigrants would not
be denied entry into American ports (North and South, though princi-
pally the former). This intention could not have been made clearer than
by the decree's requirement that passports be delivered within twenty-
four hours of a legitimate request, a provision reiterated in the law on
emigration adopted the same day. This "epoch-making" law sought to
provide protection for emigrants from the various commercial interests
involved in the emigrant trade, and enhanced the role of the state in
migration processes by creating a General Commission for Emigration
intended to guide outflows and offer assistance to those departing. 32
The Italian state strode vigorously toward supervision of migration mat-
ters during this period, though their chief concern was with facilitating
emigration, not restricting immigration.

Because of its potential impact on the fate of the much-discussed
Italian emigration, the passport law provoked sharp controversy in

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Parliament. The law's backers argued that too many Italian would-be
emigrants had been turned back in the preceding years upon their
arrival on American shores. In the debate on the proposed legislation,
one supporter of the bill, Eugenio Valli, told the chamber that more
than 1200 Italian emigrants had been refused entry into American ports
during 1899-1900. In order to forestall repetition of these denials, Valli
urged the house to mandate that, in addition to a passport, departing
emigrants be required to have a medical certificate attesting to their
state of health. "In the United States," Valli explained, "if they believe or
suspect that there is a danger that the Italian emigrant ... is likely to
become a public charge, they will throw him out with the most remorse-
less brutality." 33 Presumably these unsuccessful emigres had not been
inspected by American examiners before their departure.

According to other supporters of the passport requirement for
transatlantic migrants, the immigration officials on the other side of the
ocean were more interested in the passport as a testament of the
bearer's "good conduct" than in the migrant's physical condition. As
one leading proponent put it, possession of this implicit seal of approval
of the sending government would greatly smooth admission to the
United States, where the authorities were said to believe that the Italian
immigration "concealed an infiltration of dangerous and delinquent
elements." 34 Although they were hardly alone in this respect, the Italians
were indeed frequently suspected by American immigration officials of
carrying either political or medical contagion, as well as of being "likely
to become a public charge." 35

The adoption of the 1901 law thus reflected not so much the reawak-
ening of slumbering authoritarian habits as it did the ruling elite's
acceptance of Italy's peripheral position in the Atlantic economy and of
its vulnerability to class-based movements of social protest. Faced with
persistent problems of unemployment in the Mezzogiorno and of rela-
tive underdevelopment more generally, the Parliament sought to ensure
that those embarked on a search for work overseas would succeed in
finding what they were looking for. In addition, the Italian political lead-
ership saw emigration as an opportunity to rid itself of some of its
political malcontents. In 1896, several months after the disastrous defeat
of the Italian army at Adowa (Adua) in Abyssinia, the Southern Italian
economist and later prime minister, Francesco Nitti, had famously
averred that emigration was a "powerful safety valve against class
hatreds." Nitti knew whereof he spoke; rates of emigration from Italy
during the pre-First World War period have been shown to correlate
with a decline in votes for socialist parties. 36

Some also saw the scattering of Italians throughout the world as pro-
moting an oddly imperialist sort of nation-building. After the inglorious

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setback to colonial ambitions that was dealt to the Italians at Adowa, they
argued that the peaceful overseas migration of Italians would extend the
limits of Italy anywhere they went. But the more fervent nationalists,
who insisted that conquest was the only way of dealing with excess popu-
lation that was "worthy of a free and noble people," remained
unsatisfied. These elements finally had their day when Italy invaded
Tripoli in 1911, securing for the Italians vast expanses of desert over
which they never exercised adequate control. 37 As a result of Italy's
inability to subdue these areas, they failed to serve as an outlet for the
overpopulated areas of the peninsula. Without extensive overseas
colonies to populate, the emigration traffic remained in the more famil-
iar streams of North and South America, and the numbers of emigrants
swelled during the early twentieth century.

Discussions about how to manage the departure of so many Italians
without fatally weakening the state led, in 1912, to the adoption of a new
law on citizenship that stopped just short of recognizing dual nationality.
Instead of adopting this approach to holding onto its progeny - a step
that would have violated the posture toward dual citizenship of the
United States, in particular - the new citizenship law facilitated the rapid
resumption of citizenship by expatriates. Yet despite the decision not to
accept dual nationality, the law went on to insist that those who became
naturalized citizens elsewhere did not thereby escape their military ser-
vice obligations in Italy, thus ignoring one of the principal reasons states
might have for denying recognition of dual citizenship: the possibility of
conflicting military loyalties and obligations. 38

Ironically, if the liberal objections to the passport law as a restraint on
movement had carried the day, they might well have had the counter-
productive effect of limiting the access of Italy's seafaring jobseekers to
lands of opportunity. The law's opponents were nonetheless correct in
claiming that, even if the law was not presently intended to restrict
departures, it could be used to that end at some later time. The coming
of the Great War would prove to be that later time; when that conflagra-
tion broke out, Italy's troop needs would lead it to use passport controls
to ensure that its able-bodied sons could not simply flee the colors
unhindered.

THE SPREAD OF IDENTIFICATION DOCUMENTS FOR FOREIGNERS IN
FRANCE

During the same years that the United States was developing a
"national" (i.e., "nationwide") approach to immigration questions that
was also increasingly "nationalist" (i.e., antagonistic to other nations), 39
France of the Third Republic was taking steps to distinguish more

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

sharply between its own nationals and others. While these distinctions
did not immediately lead to restrictions on the access of the latter to
French territory, the creation of a bureaucratic machinery for deter-
mining who was a Frenchman and who was not could and would later be
used to facilitate exclusions. The documents that would be used to sepa-
rate the national from the non-national emerged from a broader debate
over the criteria of French nationality, in which the two major issues
were the search for sources of new military recruits and associated
resentment against the fact that foreigners on French soil escaped mili-
tary obligations. One major result of this debate was the adoption of the
1889 law on French citizenship, which extended French nationality to
the children of immigrants born on French soil. 40

Yet the emergence of an embryonic "social citizenship" also played a
role in promoting identification documents that would divide the
French from the non-French. Whereas health care and social insurance
laws of the Second Empire had made no distinction between national
and foreigner, most of the social welfare laws of the Third Republic man-
dated that the benefits should be reserved for French natives. 41 In view
of the large resident population of foreigners, means would have to be
developed to implement these discriminatory policies, as well as to
determine who was a French person more generally for purposes of
assessing their obligations for military service.

The relative openness of the borders beginning in the 1860s had
resulted in the influx of considerable numbers of non-Frenchmen. In
view of their exemption from military service, some argued in the
French parliament that these persons had special advantages in the
labor market relative to indigenous workers. Starting in 1884, demands
arose for a special tax on foreigners that would amount to a sort of
"compensation" for the disadvantages suffered by native hands. This
proposal failed in the face of complaints from the Foreign Ministry of
precisely the sort raised by the State Department in response to the
Chinese Exclusion Acts. The Ministry objected that such a tax would
violate the freedom of movement clauses inscribed in treaties between
France and a variety of other countries, and that therefore "such
measures would have led to France's exclusion from the international
'community of nations.'" 42

In the event, the parliament devised a means for circumventing the
possibility that France would be driven out of the "community of
nations" as a result of discriminatory taxation of foreigners. Instead of
levying a direct tax, the government would require all foreigners wishing
to establish a residence in France to register themselves in the town hall
of the place where they resided. Upon doing so, they would receive a
registration card - but only for a fee. In order to divert the suspicions of

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TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

neighboring governments that they were trying to marginalize foreign-
ers, the representative who proposed this scheme emphasized the
matter of identification rather than that of taxation. 43

As a result of this project, which found expression in a decree of 2
October 1888, the system of "anthropometric" identification devised by
Alphonse Bertillon during the preceding decade to track recidivist crim-
inals was extended to the entire resident foreign population of France.
Bertillon believed that individual stigmata were essential for identifica-
tion and could be used to construct behavioral typologies, and
bertillonage came to be an essential element of identification systems of
various kinds, along with Galton's nearly simultaneous invention of fin-
gerprinting. Still, we should not overestimate the effectiveness of these
measures: governmental officials failed to implement them due to lack
of understanding of their requirements, lack of resources to handle the
task, or simple lack of interest, and immigrants themselves were slow to
fulfill the new registration demands out of unawareness or a dearth of
concern to carry out their requirements. 44

The 1888 decree was directed at all foreigners without distinction,
but precisely its generality led to objections among those who sought to
control more rigorously the access of foreigners to the French labor
market. These protests underlay the passage of the "Law concerning the
Sojourn of Foreigners in France and the Protection of National Labor"
of 8 August 1893, which mandated registration by all foreigners wishing
to exercise an income-generating occupation. In order to register, the
immigrant - who was presumed by the law to be male - had to present a
valid piece of identification, normally a birth certificate. Those from
countries that failed to establish a person's civil identity (etat civil) had
to adduce a proof of identity validated by the consular officials of their
country. Wives who, though not engaged in commercial activities
directly, assisted their spouses in such businesses, were required to sign a
personal declaration to this effect. In short, the law aimed to afford the
French state a better "embrace" of those who, depending on economic
circumstances, might be deemed less deserving of income-producing
work than French nationals. Non-wage-earning foreigners such as stu-
dents and rentiers remained subject to the 1888 decree. The statute of
1893 distinguished for the first time in French law between "working"
and "non-working" immigrants, and thus helped to create the now-
familiar image of the "immigrant worker." 45

The trouble with the 1893 law was that it imposed controls only on
those who sought a fixed residence in France and wished to pursue an
occupation on that basis. In other words, it left out those who practiced
an ambulatory metier. Gradually, the parliament - notably including
future prime minister Georges Clemenceau - directed its attention to

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this suspect group. As a result, a 1912 law focused on the control of
"nomads" (itinerant persons and groups) and the vagaries of their exis-
tence. While the law ignored the question of nationality and
theoretically applied to all "nomads," it was in fact directed at foreigners,
according to a contemporary analyst, for most of the "nomads" then cir-
culating in France were of foreign origin. Whatever their nationality,
such persons were now required to carry the "cornet des nomades," an
"anthropometric identity document" that included fingerprints and
photographs. The point was to insure that these wanderers would have a
precise and "immutable" identity, even if this necessitated imposing a
new one upon them. The authorities were free to refuse to issue these
documents to those requiring them, however, giving the government
"the possibility of denying individuals not only the right to reside but
also the right to enter, on the grounds that their presence is deemed
dangerous." Here the mobile non-national, the inscrutable outsider
within, increasingly replaces the itinerant dangerous classes - the inter-
nal "foreign" enemy of old, which in Germany had been liberated from
these restrictions by the North German law of 1867 - as the object of
routine suspicion. By 1917, identification cards would become manda-
tory for all foreigners, and passport controls on their entry were
reintroduced. 46

The development and distribution of various forms of documentary
identification helped to constitute people of different countries as
mutually exclusive "nationals" who shared a common interest in the fate
of their state - an interest that might well put them at odds with the
nationals of other states. In late nineteenth-century Germany, this pro-
cess grew to a considerable degree out of the struggles over the fate of
estate-based agriculture in the German east, where a beleaguered aris-
tocracy drew on impoverished Slavic workers that came to be perceived
as a threat to the purity of Germandom.

THE RESURRECTION OF PASSPORT CONTROLS IN LATE NINETEENTH-
CENTURY GERMANY

Although the liberal North German law of 1867 remained the funda-
mental statute regarding passport controls in Germany until after the
Second World War, its provisions with respect to population movements
into Germany were already being abrogated in the late 1870s. 47 In early
1879, the Imperial government imposed passport requirements on
those coming from Russia in order, it said, to forestall the importation of
a plague that had broken out there. Travelers returning to Germany
from Russia were now required to have in their possession a passport
that had been visaed within three days of their departure by the German

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embassy in Saint Petersburg or by a German consular official, and visaed
again upon their arrival at the German border. 48

The reintroduction of passport requirements in order to protect the
German population from a serious medical threat would seem to have
been reasonable enough. Yet only a few months later, the order was
revised and the requirement was dropped that visa applicants demon-
strate that they had not been in any of the areas (thought to be)
contaminated by the plague during the preceding twenty days. In other
words, all travelers from Russia were now required to have a passport
visaed by German authorities in Russia and at the borders of the
Empire. 49 A further revision of the law in December 1880 softened its
strictures somewhat by repealing the visa obligation for subjects of the
Empire, as well as for those from countries that permitted Germans to
enter their territories without visas. 50 Nearly fifteen years later, yet
another update of the law abolished visa requirements entirely on those
returning from Russia, but left the passport requirement intact. 51

These various revisions of the original February 1879 ordinance
suggest that the German restrictions on entrants from Russia were
not entirely related to the plague. The influx of Russian-Polish labor
probably played a role as well. Despite the insistence of agricultural (and
some industrial) employers that they needed labor, Bismarck - citing
the "threat to the state potentially posed by a Polonization of a large
segment of the Prussian population" - ordered the expulsion from
Germany of some 40 000 Polish workers in 1885, and Poles were
excluded from Germany for the next five years. 52 The demand for labor
continued unabated, however, and after Bismarck's fall in 1890 the
importation of Polish workers was resumed under strict conditions. 53 In
1893, no less a figure than Max Weber called for the "absolute exclusion
of the Russian-Polish workers from the German east," a position widely
held among political leaders despite the interests of agricultural and
other employers. In the absence of such restrictions, Weber famously
feared that Germany was "threatened by a Slavic flood that would entail
a cultural retrogression of several epochs." 54

Despite the obvious ethnocentrism in Weber's remarks, it is worth
recalling that he also viewed the importation of the Poles as a "means of
struggle in the anticipated class struggle in this area, directed against
the growing self-consciousness of the workers." In effect, Weber saw the
Poles as "scabs" in the contest between agricultural workers and employ-
ers. 55 In this respect the position of the Poles in eastern Germany
paralleled quite closely that of the Chinese in California a few years
earlier: both groups were used by employers as instruments in the ripen-
ing class struggle, and both became the object of restrictive measures
based on their alleged "racial" characteristics despite employer interests

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

in their continued presence. "Racial" concerns would increasingly
trump economic rationality as pseudo-scientific theories of eugenics
moved to the fore in Germany and elsewhere in the coming years.

The imposition of passport controls on those coming from Russia was
in all likelihood part of the inchoate efforts to regulate the flow of Polish
migrant labor. During this period, it was not unknown for foremen on
agricultural estates seeking to hamper the mobility of foreign workers to
"require that the workers give them their passports and luggage." 56 This
sort of usage would help explain why after 1894 passports were required
for those entering Germany from Russia even though visas were not; in
these cases, the passport was being used simply as an identification doc-
ument rather than as a border-crossing authorization. In any event, the
sustained controversy over the importation of Polish workers ultimately
led to the imposition in 1908 of a Legitimationszwang mandating that all
foreign workers carry an identification card. These documents were an
essential aspect of "a system of surveillance of foreigners as complete
and total as feasible, as well as [of] an extensive bureaucracy for their
supervision and control" in the form of the German Farm Workers
Agency (Deutsche Feldarbeiterzentrale) , first established in 1905. Still, the
degree of effectiveness of these restrictions should not be overestimated,
for they were frequently skirted by employers and workers alike when
this served their interests. 57

Alternatively, the continued existence of passport requirements for
travelers from Russia may have been a way of punishing that country for
its continued insistence upon passport controls as a requirement of
entry into its territories, in contradiction to the more open-handed
practice then established in most of western and central Europe. 58 Yet
as we have seen, a countertrend - a drift toward the "nationalization" of
European states, that is, their stricter distribution of positions and ben-
efits to their own nationals - had clearly been underway during these
years. Toward the end of the century, this nationalizing process found
explicit expression in a Prussian decree strictly prohibiting the relevant
authorities from issuing passports to foreigners other than in excep-
tional cases, a departure from a practice still quite common at that
point. "Close examination [of the applicant's nationality] is necessary,"
the order insisted, "because unfortunate negotiations with foreign gov-
ernments may have to take place that often result in Germany having to
take in the passport-holder simply because he or she has a German
passport." 09 The international system of states comprising mutually
exclusive bodies of citizens was taking firmer shape, not least because
governments increasingly had the capacity to get documents into peo-
ple's hands identifying them as belonging to one country or another.
Individual states, moreover, were less and less willing to extend their

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TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

protections to non-nationals, giving rise to a system in which passports
would be granted only by the officials of those states and only to their
own nationals.

Still, on the very eve of the First World War, a German student of the
passport system wrote:

Because in recent times the position of foreigners has grown much differ-
ent from before . . . most modern states have, with but a few exceptions,
abolished their passport laws or at least neutralized them through non-
enforcement . . . [Foreigners] are no longer viewed by states with
suspicion and mistrust but rather, in recognition of the tremendous value
that can be derived from trade and exchange, welcomed with open arms
and, for this reason, hindrances are removed from their path to the great-
est extent possible. 60

It seems clear from the evidence we have examined so far in this chapter
that this assessment cannot have been an entirely accurate picture of the
foreigner's situation. Yet these remarks suggest the enormous influence
that economic liberalism still held in the minds of many Europeans. It
was this latter set of ideas that had undergirded the unprecedented trend
toward the relaxation of passport controls in late nineteenth-century
Europe. Only the Great War would definitively reverse that trend.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE "TEMPORARY" REIMPOSITION OF
PASSPORT CONTROLS

The booming of the guns of August 1914 brought to a sudden close the
era during which governments viewed foreigners without "suspicion and
mistrust" and they were free to traverse borders relatively unmolested. As
was typical of wartime, the conflagration generated hostility toward those
who might bear the patrie ill-will, and a renewed preoccupation with con-
trolling their movements. Mobilization for war stiffens the backs of states
and, like the threat of a hanging, concentrates their minds; administra-
tion becomes focused on one single and overriding aim. The achievement
of that aim during the First World War led to the consolidation of views
about foreigners and methods for restricting their movements that would
prove to be an enduring part of our world. It was not only foreigners that
were affected, however, even if they bore the brunt of the new restrictions:
the nationals of the various countries were subjected to intensified docu-
mentary surveillance during the Great War as well.

In pursuit of the objective of greater control over the movements
alike of the national and the alien, passport controls were reintroduced
across the continent. At first, reflecting the persistence of the view that
such controls were acceptable only during time of war, the newly reinsti-
tuted passport requirements were typically thought to be provisional

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

measures, responses to a state of emergency. That the war would ulti-
mately have the effect of bringing an end to the laissez faire era in
international migration would not have been predicted by many con-
temporaries. 61

Thus, for example, French passport restrictions from the revolution-
ary period that had been "allowed to lapse" were restored in the face of
the crisis. 62 In addition, French lawmakers used the crisis to demarcate
further between the French citizen and the foreigner via documents.
Despite official protests from the French trade union confederation CGT
that some of the newly adopted fingerprinted identification cards treated
the citizen like "a convict," war-inspired xenophobia allowed the govern-
ment to strengthen the documentary identification requirements for
foreigners. In consequence of two decrees promulgated in April 1917,
identification cards became mandatory for all foreigners above the age of
fifteen living in France. The cards were to include the bearer's national-
ity, civil status, occupation, photograph, and signature, and special color
codes were employed to mark out wage earners in agriculture and indus-
try. 63 The foreigner - and especially the "immigrant worker" - was
becoming more and more intelligible by the documents he or she carried.

In Britain, the Aliens Restriction Act 1914 sharply enhanced the
power of the government, "when a state of war exists," to prohibit or
impose restrictions on the landing or embarkation of aliens in the
United Kingdom. The law made no explicit mention of passport
requirements, which in any event had already been rejuvenated in 1905
in response to the threat of a large-scale influx of East European Jews,
and only after long years of opposition to an Aliens Bill by the stalwartly
Mancunian Liberals. 64 Still, the law put the onus of proving that a person
is not an alien on that person, making documentary evidence of one's
nationality largely unavoidable, particularly if one did not look or sound
"British." It also provided for the possibility of requiring aliens to live, or
of prohibiting them from living, in certain areas, and of registering with
the authorities their place of domicile, change of abode, or movement
within the UK. Finally, the Act made provision for the appointment of
immigration officers to carry out the order, an expansion of immigra-
tion bureaucracy that helped strengthen the momentum for keeping
passport controls in place after the war. 65

The German government, too, adopted new passport controls under
the emergency clauses of the liberal 1867 law - but now, rather than apply-
ing only to those coming from Russia, they applied to everyone. Already
on 31 July 1914, Germany implemented "temporary" passport restrictions
on anyone entering the Empire from abroad. In the interest of permitting
the return of eager or otherwise mobilized soldiers, the requirement was
relaxed for those who could produce papers demonstrating that they were

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TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

German subjects, stateless former Germans, or permanent residents of
the Reich who had only been abroad temporarily. This provision presum-
ably was implemented for the good reason that these people might very
well not have had passports when they originally left Germany.
Meanwhile, in order to avoid the flight of unwilling cannon fodder, those
owing military service were to be eligible for passports for exit from
Germany only with the approval of their commanding officers. At the
same time, foreigners in any area of the Empire declared to be in a state
of war were required to have a passport giving a proper account of their
person. In the absence of a passport, other satisfactory documents were to
be accepted, again presumably because the new regulations might have
caught them with their papers down. 66

Before the year was out, Germany strengthened these regulations fur-
ther. Now, anyone who wished to enter or leave the territory of the
Empire (excluding Alsace-Lorraine) was to be in possession of a pass-
port. Foreigners anywhere in that territory, not just in war zones, also
were required to have a passport or other acceptable document. All such
passports, moreover, had to include a personal description, photograph,
and signature of the bearer, along with an official certification that the
"bearer is actually the person represented in the photograph." Finally,
foreign passports for purposes of entry into the Empire had to have a visa
from German diplomatic or consular authorities. At least during this
early phase of the war, the Germans were nearly as concerned about
controlling the movements of German nationals - in part, no doubt, in
order to keep the soldiery fresh with recruits - as they were about keep-
ing watch on those of foreigners. 67

The next step in securing the territory of the patrie at war, taken in
mid-1916, added to the passport requirements that a visa (Sichtvermerk)
from German authorities was to be required from everyone, German or
foreign, entering or leaving the territory of the Empire as well as of cer-
tain occupied areas. 68 In addition to complicating the task of departing
from German territory, this proviso fortified the "remote control" of the
German military and consular bureaucracy over those wishing to enter
from abroad, effectively extending outward the borders of the Empire.

An accompanying order detailed, with stereotypically German
precision, by and to whom German passports could be issued, the infor-
mation they were to include, a standard passport form, the acceptable
form of a foreign passport (which was supposed to conform to all the
criteria of a German passport, including photograph, etc.), the form of
a personal identity document (Personalausweis) acceptable in place of a
passport, and the terms and conditions for the issuance of visas, depend-
ing on whether these were for exit from, entry into, or transit through
German territory. The order reaffirmed the late nineteenth-century

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stricture that German passports could be issued only to German nation-
als, a status that was to be appropriately recorded. Notably, if the
passport bearer had previously been stateless or of non-German nation-
ality, such prior nationality or lack thereof and the date of naturalization
to German citizenship were to be duly indicated in the passport. 69
Clearly, the German authorities thought it was best to be aware of the
possibility that someone might have divided loyalties, even despite
having undergone the rigors of naturalization.

The Italians' first step concerning documentary controls on move-
ment after the outbreak of hostilities was not to issue new passports, but
rather to recall those already in circulation among their citizens. By a
decree of 6 August 1914, the government suspended the right of emi-
gration of those obliged to do military service, annulling all passports in
their possession. Like the German passport regulations, this order indi-
cated the close connection between passport controls and efforts to
insure that military recruits for the defense of the patrie would not be
wanting. 70 Given the over-representation in the poorly paid and worse-
fed infantry of Southerners with only a weak sense of national loyalties,
it was hardly surprising that the Italian government would expect con-
scripts to abscond if given the chance.

In an effort to forestall such insubordination, the government tight-
ened the passport requirements for Italians going abroad to work in May
1915. Now, those bound anywhere, not just across the Atlantic, had to
have a passport in order to leave, and in order to get one they had to
present a work contract to the officials of the Royal Commissariat of
Emigration. This, too, was intended as a "transitory" restriction, and
would be abandoned once peace returned and Italy resumed its position
as labor supplier to the more developed world. 71

On the same day, the Italian government imposed passport require-
ments on foreigners wishing to enter the Kingdom, reversing many years
of an open-door policy. They made up for lost time, however, by imme-
diately requiring not just passports but visas issued by Italian diplomatic
or consular authorities in the place of departure as well. The severe law
went on to require foreigners to present themselves to public security
officials within twenty-four hours of their arrival to explain the circum-
stances of their sojourn in Italy, as well as any military obligations which
they might owe to the state of which they were nationals. A copy of this
written declaration was to be sent to district officials responsible for pub-
lic security; the declarants received a certificate attesting that they had
fulfilled the requirements of the law. The papers necessary for moving
around within Italy as a foreigner began to multiply. In addition, the law
made residents of Italy part of the apparatus for keeping watch over
foreigners. Anyone, citizen or foreigner, sheltering a foreigner had to

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TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

submit to police officials a list of such persons within five days of their
arrival, and within twenty-four hours to inform those officials of their
departure and "the direction they have taken." In an indication of the
growing reliance on modern technology to control movement, the
Italians, like the Germans, demanded that such passports include a pho-
tograph and a signature authenticated by the issuing authority. 72

Yet the fact that each government felt the need to state such require-
ments also reflected the incoherence of the passport system of the time
and the uncertain status of these documents in international law. The
Germans' insistence that the passports of those entering the Empire
conform to German standards could not make them do so. Only after
the Second World War would serious intergovernmental efforts be
undertaken to standardize passport requirements in order to insure that
those wishing to enter a particular country would have documents meet-
ing its stipulations.

The year 1916 intensified the Italian concern with documentary
controls on movement, yet all three of the regulations issued concerned
Italians rather than foreigners. A decree of 16 March temporarily
suspended the issuance of passports for travel abroad, whether for work
or any other purpose. 73 Three months later, another required a passport
of every Italian citizen entering or leaving the kingdom. While this
decree again made passports available for going abroad, such passports
had to include a visa from the district public security office. Visas from
an Italian embassy or legation were also necessary for entering the
Kingdom, and these had to indicate both the length of the visa's validity
and the precise location at which the person would enter Italian terri-
tory. Subjects of Austria-Hungary who were Italian nationals were
required to have a special passport described in the decree. 74 Finally, an
order of 27 August revived internal passports, a document last addressed
in statute in the law on public security of 1889. In order to be valid, these
passes, too, now had to have photographs and to conform to the new
model attached to the decree. 75

Clearly, the opponents of the 1901 law had been right to fear that
passport controls on Italians broader than those envisaged by that legis-
lation might someday return. What is striking about the wartime Italian
laws is that, despite having reversed a long-standing policy of undocu-
mented entry to foreigners, most of the wartime restrictive legislation
actually concerned Italians wishing to leave the country. Italy's tradi-
tional experience as a country of emigration suggests that, when the
exigencies of war demanded stepped-up military recruitment, retaining
Italians who might have sought to shirk their soldierly obligations in
favor of seeking work abroad was a larger problem for the government
than that of keeping out foreigners. Indeed, some 290 000 soldiers -

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

about six percent of the total — faced courts martial in Italy between May
1915 and September 1919, usually for desertion. 76

"TEMPORARY" PASSPORT CONTROLS BECOME PERMANENT

The generalized anxiety about borders that existed during the war did
not subside with its end. Instead, the "temporary" measures imple-
mented to control access to and departure from the territories of
European states persisted into the shallow, fragile peace that was the
interwar period. Although based on the liberal 1867 law of the North
German Confederation abolishing passport requirements, an order of
June 1919 reiterated and rendered permanent the wartime requirement
that anyone crossing the borders of the Reich in either direction be in
possession of a passport with visa, and reaffirmed the paragraph insist-
ing that all foreigners in the territory of the Empire carry a passport. 77

In Britain, similarly, the wartime restrictions on aliens won greater
permanence with the Aliens Order 1920, which extended the validity of
previous restrictions beyond the war's end. These restrictions, according
to the Order, "should continue in force . . . not only in the [wartime]
circumstances aforesaid, but at any time." Henceforward, anyone entering
or leaving the UK was required to have "either a valid passport furnished
with a photograph of himself or some other document satisfactorily
establishing his national status and identity." The passport became the
backbone of the system of documentary substantiation of identity used to
register and keep watch over the movements of aliens in the UK. As in
Italy during the war, foreigners in the UK were now subject to extensive
reporting and documentary requirements, and keepers of inns in which
aliens might happen to stay were drawn into the apparatus of surveil-
lance over foreigners. The Order also mandated the maintenance of a
"central register of aliens" under the direction of the Secretary of State. 78

The Italians remained the anomaly. A decree of May 1919 reaffirmed
the wartime requirement that emigrants have a passport in order to
leave, whatever their destination. 79 According to a study of emigration
restrictions by the International Labor Office, moreover, Italians intend-
ing to depart for work in countries that required passports had to show a
work contract before receiving their travel documents. 80 Again, however,
what might have appeared to be - and, when necessary, could be trans-
formed into - restrictions are better understood from the point of view
of Italy's continued interest in exporting workers. As passport controls
remained in force across Europe and in the United States after the war,
the obligation that Italian emigrants have a passport and, where
required, a work contract in order to get it were clearly efforts to facilitate
rather than limit emigration. The passport obligations for foreigners

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TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

entering Italy during the war years were never abolished, but this matter
appears to have been of considerably less import to the Italian govern-
ment than that of insuring that would-be emigrant workers be in a
position to enter their destination countries, at least until the Fascists
took power in the early 1920s.

THE UNITED STATES AND THE END OF THE LAISSEZ FAIRE E RA IN
MIGRATION

In the aftermath of the First World War, "the laissez-faire era in interna-
tional labor migration had come to a close." 81 An important cause of this
caesura was the erection of rigid barriers to entry into the United States,
for it, too, allowed initially temporary, wartime passport restrictions on
aliens to persist into the postwar period, at the same time that it extended
the range of national groups who were denied entry into the country. The
United States government first responded to the renewal of European
restrictions on movement with an executive order on 15 December 1915,
requiring all persons leaving the United States for a foreign country to
have a passport visaed by American officials before departure - a prudent
enough measure in view of the fact that such documents had once again
come to be required in many destination countries. 82

Then, in early 1917, the US Congress adopted a law - over repeated
vetoes by President Wilson - that excluded adult immigrants unable to
pass a simple literacy test, which had the effect of excluding large num-
bers of people from areas of Europe that offered their inhabitants little
schooling. In addition, the law prohibited entry by those from a "barred
zone" in the Pacific; with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigration
largely forbidden, the main targets of this legislation were Asian Indians
who were technically "Aryans" or "Caucasians," and who were thus
excluded on geographical rather than ethnoracial grounds. 83

Finally, on 22 May 1918 - with the war nearly at an end - Congress
adopted "An Act to prevent in time of war departure from or entry into
the United States contrary to the public safety," which authorized the
American President to impose specific restrictions on aliens wishing to
enter or leave the country. The Act thus gave statutory foundation to the
passport requirements adopted in December 1915. On 8 August 1918,
President Wilson gave the law teeth with an executive order mandating
that "hostile aliens must obtain permits for all departures from, and
entries into, the United States." 84 At the end of 1919, Congress passed a
revised version of the 1918 law that addressed only the issue of entry into
the United States and dropped any mention of the proviso that the
country find itself "in time of war." 85 As a result of these laws, the puta-
tively "temporary" measures designed to ferret out "hostile aliens" were

117

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

transmuted into weapons in the fight against "the undesirable, the
enemy of law and order, the breeder of revolution, and the advocate of
anarchy . . ." Passport controls came to play an important role at this
point; one indication of this fact is that the various regional sections of
the 1918 report of the Commissioner General of Immigration included
only one separate discussion of "passport matters," whereas by 1919 all of
the regions did so. 86 With Asians from the "barred zone" almost entirely
excluded, literacy tests required, and documentary restrictions in place,
the stage was set for more thoroughgoing measures of exclusion.

Yet in one region that constituted a significant source of immigrant
flows, namely Mexico, restrictionism failed to carry the day, although
not for lack of official attention. It should be recalled here that US
involvement in the First World War was sparked to a considerable extent
by the "Zimmermann telegram," which was published in the American
press on 1 March 1917, and instructed the German minister in Mexico
City to offer German support to Mexican efforts to recover Texas, New
Mexico, and Arizona in the event of war between Germany and the
United States. 87 With fears of alien infiltration from the south on the
rise, beginning in 1917 border control measures along the Mexican
frontier grew feverish. In a letter to the Commissioner General of
Immigration dated 5 February 1918, however, the assiduous Supervising
Inspector of the Immigration Bureau responsible for the border, Frank
Berkshire, informed his boss that his resources were inadequate to
patrol the border effectively, and that the cooperation of other govern-
ment agencies and the military, while willing, was too uncoordinated to
be of use. Berkshire thus proposed the creation of a separate, perma-
nent organization, "similar perhaps to the Northwest Mounted Police of
Canada," numbering 2000-3000 men and charged specifically and
exclusively with the task of controlling movements across the border. 88

Apparently Berkshire failed to receive the immediate help he had
requested, however, for he soon felt compelled to inform his superiors
that the efforts of his subordinates to control the border had been
largely unavailing. Indeed, to the extent that they accomplished any-
thing at all, they had exercised control over the wrong people. In the
1918 report of the Commissioner General of Immigration, Berkshire
wrote in the section of his summary concerning "Passport Matters" that
the number of agents detailed to monitor the border was simply not suf-
ficient to be effective. Berkshire noted that passport controls, however
meticulously carried out, could be undertaken only at the "regular
immigration ports of entry," which left many miles of "remote and
unfrequented points" easy targets for the movements of enemies.
Accordingly, Berkshire concluded:

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TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

It is logical to assume that the most dangerous of the enemy's agents have
sought, and will continue to seek, these points to avoid attracting atten-
tion. In the main, therefore, the passport regulations as now enforced
discommode thousands of loyal, or in any event, not unfriendly persons
whose legitimate business or innocent pleasures naturally take them
through the regular channels, while the frontier elsewhere is inadequately
guarded. 89

In essence, Berkshire was pointing to the much greater difficulty of
using documents to control a land border than to restrict the entry of
passengers on steamships (or, later, airplanes) . A few years later, as the
futility of paper barriers in the face of so much open country came to be
recognized, his pleas for more manpower to control the lengthy
Mexican frontier would be answered with the creation of the Border
Patrol in 1924. Despite its preoccupation nowadays with controlling the
movements of Mexican immigrants, the Patrol initially focused on
restricting the entry of Europeans and Asians whose immigration had
been circumscribed by the various acts of the preceding years. With the
late nineteenth-century foreclosure of cheap immigrant labor from
across the Pacific and the growing restrictions on European immigrants,
Mexico had come to serve as a critical source of labor in Southwestern
agriculture and industry - a role it continues to play today. The new
Border Patrol, gradually retooled to regulate the influx of countless
brown-skinned peasants, would ultimately come to play an important if
ambiguous role in regulating the flow of Mexican labor into the United
States, gingerly negotiating the conflicting pressures of labor-hungry
agricultural interests on the one hand, and domestic political groups
bent on restriction on the other. 90

The creation of the Border Patrol took place in the context of a much
broader restrictionist thrust on the part of the American government
that would soon entail the projection of state power far beyond the ter-
ritorial borders of the country. In 1921, the United States adopted the
first "national origins" quota, restricting immigration to a small percent-
age of those nationalities represented in the US population in the 1910
census. Realizing subsequently that large numbers of Southern and
Eastern Europeans had entered the country by that time, the defenders
of white America returned to the ramparts three years later to pass
another law that took as a baseline the 1890 census, when the "Nordic"
stock of the country was more predominant. 91 But restriction of incom-
ing persons along these lines was easier said than done. Because the
1921 law had mandated a quota system without adequate provision for
its implementation, hundreds of excess visas were issued abroad to
steamship passengers making their way to the US. As a result, steamer

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

captains would seek "to bring their passengers into the United States at
the earliest possible moment after the opening of the new quota month.
Midnight ship racing into New York Harbor in order to cross the
entrance line before quotas were exhausted became a monthly event,
and much distress and many deportations usually followed." 92 This
arrangement simply would not do.

The Immigration Act of 1924 thus provided that American consuls
abroad be charged with the task of keeping control of the quotas
themselves and distributing immigration visas accordingly. At the same
time, various other qualifications - including police checks, medical
inspections, financial responsibility determinations, and political
interviews - could be established long before the intending immigrant
reached the country. As many who have taken the tour of Ellis Island
National Park will know, the stated purpose of this approach was to avoid
situations in which eager but impecunious emigrants might sell off all
their worldly possessions in order to purchase a steamship ticket, only to
be told upon arrival that they were inadmissible for any number of
reasons. In contrast to this interpretation, Zolberg has characterized this
set of procedures as a form of "remote border control," a major innova-
tion in immigration policy implementation that "proved remarkably
effective from the time of [its] institutionalization in the 1920s until well
into [the] 1970s . . . [and] which by any reasonable standard must be
reckoned as a remarkable administrative achievement." 93

While both interpretations of the new requirement may be correct
without contradiction, for our purposes it is essential to see that the sys-
tem worked because of the development of documentary requirements
that powerfully supported the claims of states to monopolize the legiti-
mate means of movement. The passport requirements on foreigners left
intact after the First World War provided the essential administrative
basis for the implementation of the restrictionary immigration laws of
the 1920s. How else was the immigration officer at Ellis Island to know
whether a would-be immigrant belonged to one of the nationalities
whose immigration was to be restricted under that legislation?

It is true that the newly permanent passport controls that persisted after
the First World War generally applied not just to foreigners, but to both
citizens and aliens. This was a necessary outcome of the desire to control
borders against unwanted entrants, however, and aliens had increasingly
come to be seen as lacking any prima facie claim to access to the territory
of a state other than their own. In the absence of telltale markers such as
language or skin color - which are themselves inconclusive as indicators
of one's national identity, of course, but which nonetheless frequently

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TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

have been taken as such - a person's nationality simply cannot be deter-
mined without recourse to documents. As an ascribed status, it cannot
be read off a person's appearance.

The (re)imposition of passport controls by numerous West European
countries and the United States during the First World War and their
persistence after the war was an essential aspect of that "revolution identi-
ficatoire" 94 that vastly enhanced the ability of governments to identify
their citizens, to distinguish them from non-citizens, and thus to con-
struct themselves as "nation-states." With the general rise of the
protectionist state out of the fires of the First World War, 95 the countries
of the North Atlantic world became caught up in a general trend toward
nationalist self-defense against foreigners. Documents such as passports
and identification cards that help determine "who is in" and "who is out"
of the nation here took center stage, and thus became an enduring and
omnipresent part of our world.

These documents were an essential element of that burgeoning
"infrastructural" power to "grasp" individuals that distinguishes modern
states from their predecessors. 96 Specific historical forces such as the
development of welfare states and the rise of labor movements seeking
to control access to jobs and social benefits certainly played their part in
promoting immigration controls and the sharpening of states' capacities
to distinguish between "them" and "us." 97 Yet there were specifically
political factors involved as well, particularly the advance of processes of
democratization that increasingly brought the individual members of
national states into closer relationship with states across the North
Atlantic world. The tighter connection between citizens and states as a
result of democratization led to an intensified preoccupation with deter-
mining who is "in" and who is "out" when it came to enjoying the
benefits - both political and economic - of membership in those states. 98
This is one of the ways that democratization promoted bureaucratiza-
tion, a dynamic that Weber noted long ago. In the process, passports
became essential to the bureaucratic administration of modern mass
migration, just as identity cards have become something like the "cur-
rency" of domestic administration, marking out eligibles from
ineligibles in the areas of voting, social services, and much more besides.

121

CHAPTER 5

FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?
PASSPORTS AND CONSTRAINTS ON
MOVEMENT FROM THE INTERWAR TO
THE POSTWAR ERA

The growing importance of national belonging resulted in a profusion
of bureaucratic techniques for administering the boundaries of the
nation, in both territorial and membership terms, in the period up to
and immediately after the First World War. At the same time, the
number of states that understood themselves in national terms was
increasing as a product of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian,
Ottoman, and Russian Empires: the era witnessed the end of dynastic
states in Europe and the elimination of the "easy-going nations" of the
past in favor of what Karl Polanyi called the "crustacean type of nation,"
which crabbily distinguished between "us" and "them."

The rapidly improving technological possibilities for movement thus
confronted intensified controls on ingress into the territories of
European states, although restrictions on departure had increasingly
become the province of authoritarian states alone. Egidio Reale, the
leading contemporary analyst of the new passport regime, describes its
impact with a variant of the Rip Van Winkle story: a man awakes during
the interwar period from a slumber of some years to find that he can
talk on the telephone to friends in London, Paris, Tokyo, or New York,
hear stock market quotations or concerts from around the globe, fly
across the oceans - but not traverse earthly borders without stringent
bureaucratic formalities in the course of which his nationality would be
scrutinized closely. 1

Yet the unprecedented difficulty of international migration that
flowed from the successful state monopolization of the legitimate means
of movement in the post-First World War era had ironic consequences
as well. In a world of nation-states, in which the population of the globe
is theoretically divided up into mutually exclusive bodies of citizens,

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FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

international migration is an anomaly with which the state system has
some awkwardness coping. Those who lack the attributes of citizenship
in a country, and especially those who find themselves without the docu-
ments attesting to their legal identity and status, face special problems in
navigating the system. After the First World War, as huge population
flows were set in motion by political and social change, forces associated
with the League of Nations - an organization that both ratified and
sought to transcend the notion of a world comprising nation-states - felt
compelled by circumstances to attempt to deal with the reality that many
in the game of international musical chairs had ended up without a seat
in the turbulent aftermath of the war.

With millions of people on the move in response to the transforma-
tions that were taking place, and often seeking to escape violent conflict,
the limitations of a system that presupposed mutually exclusive citizen-
ries all of whom were distributed uniquely to one state or another
became apparent almost immediately in the interwar era. The most
obvious challenge to such a system was the emergence of that "most
symptomatic group in contemporary politics," the stateless, whose plight
"is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for
them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress
them." 2 The efforts to alleviate some of the problems encountered by
these wanderers among worlds led to the creation of the first interna-
tional refugee regime, a coordinated if not entirely effective effort on
the part of numerous states to clear away the difficulties faced by many
stateless migrants during this period. Prominent among these efforts
were attempts to reduce the barriers to migration that the stateless con-
fronted, not least by providing them with travel documents that would
be recognized by potential receiving states. 3

Despite the innovation of the burgeoning refugee regime and its
(limited) contribution to resolving the various problems of forced
migrants, the period would culminate in dramatic movements of
refugees occasioned by the Nazis' project to attain European (and
indeed global) dominion. The biological racism at the root of Nazi ide-
ology underwrote a kind of national imperialism. The ultimate aim of
Nazi policy was to eliminate elements of the German population that
were "alien to the blood" (art- or blutsfremd) - especially Jews - or "life
unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben, such as homosexuals and
Gypsies), as well as to subjugate, enslave, and exterminate groups out-
side German borders that were deemed inferior in the racial hierarchy,
such as Slavs. It is not difficult to see that the achievement of this racial-
imperialist program demanded a great deal of classification and
identification of particular population groups. Identity documents and
the imposition of visible marks of group affiliation - a reversal of earlier

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

trends away from "writing on the body" against the will of those written
upon - were crucial to the Nazis' goals of creating a purified master race
that ruled arbitrarily over or extirpated non-Aryans. The hardening of
passport controls on movement that issued from the First World War
would also contribute to the miseries faced by the many victim groups
that the Nazis singled out for "special treatment" during their assault on
Western civilization, although the extent to which immigration restric-
tions in the democratic countries resulted in disaster for the Jews has
recently been the subject of renewed debate.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL REFUGEE REGIME IN THE
EARLY INTERWAR PERIOD

In the tempest of revolution and imperial collapse that followed the First
World War, millions were set adrift as multinational empires were trans-
formed into nation-states across much of Europe. At the same time,
populations that fell under the sway of authoritarian states found that
their chances for departure were undermined, whether in the interest
of strengthening military forces or to prevent the enemies of a regime
from propagandizing against it abroad. This pattern testifies to the truth
of the observation that a concomitant of the nation-building processes
of this period was that "prohibitions against exit were associated with
the creation of internal conditions that produced a desire to leave and
with expulsion." 4 This apparendy contradictory set of circumstances
characterized especially well the situation in Russia after the Bolshevik
revolution.

Among the groups impelled to leave their countries of origin follow-
ing the First World War, the refugees from Russia were surely the most
prominent in the eyes of those concerned with migration issues.
Subjects of the new Communist regime left the Soviet Union en masse
during the civil war and the associated famines of 1919-22; the demog-
rapher Eugene Kulischer estimated the total out-migration from that
country alone in the early interwar period at 1.75 million. This figure
included a variety of ethnically non-Russian groups such as Germans,
Poles, Rumanians, Lithuanians, Letts, Karelians, and Greeks; the
"Russian emigration" proper he estimated at some 900 000. 5

In the unlikely event that these unfortunates had managed to secure
satisfactory travel documents before departing, the Soviets soon took
long-distance vengeance on those who left the USSR for their presumed
antipathy toward the regime. A decree of 15 December 1922 denational-
ized the vast majority of Russian refugees, rendering them stateless
and invalidating their travel documents. In other words, by manipulat-
ing the legal status of its subjects, the Bolsheviks could punish from afar

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FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

those who, by voting with their feet, brought discredit on the Soviet
experiment. During the same year of 1922, the regime began strictly to
prohibit emigration. This stance on the part of the Soviet government
helped to stabilize the Russian refugee problem in Europe, although
migrants continued to leave for the Far East until 1935. 6 Here, indeed,
was the textbook combination of restrictions on departure and the pro-
duction of a desire to leave that was most typical of the authoritarian
states of this period.

The ascendancy to power of the Fascists in Italy in late 1922 had
similar consequences, if on a much smaller scale. Soon after assuming
the reins, Mussolini began rattling sabers and promoting the use of
force in politics. In January of the following year, Mussolini created the
Fascist Militia - a largely symbolic force, perhaps, but a private army for
il Duce - "to defend the Fascist revolution." Within two months, the
regime tightened passport requirements for those wishing to leave the
country who were liable for military service. 7 The new regulations
bespoke the Fascists' inclination to reverse the policy of Italian govern-
ments before the First World War, which were oriented toward
facilitating emigration as a safety valve for class conflict and the tensions
generated by economic underdevelopment. The Fascist posture con-
cerning emigration was articulated by Dino Grandi, an Undersecretary
of Foreign Affairs, in 1927:

Why should Italy still serve as a kind of human fish pond, to feed countries
suffering from demographic impoverishment? And why should Italian
mothers continue to bear sons to- serve as soldiers for other nations?
Fascism will cease to encourage emigration, which saps the vital forces of
race and State. 8

By the late 1920s, the Fascists had promulgated a law against "abusive
emigration" and were withdrawing passports from suspected anti-fascists.
Still, Italian exile communities flourished in France; the aforementioned
Egidio Reale, a socialist, was part of that emigration. The Fascist regime
sought to spy on them in part by magnanimously offering to renew their
travel documents abroad, an opportunity many of them had the good
sense to decline. Ironically, the strictures against departure and the use of
internal exile as a means of dealing with regime opponents had the result
that Italian fascism proved to be the incubator of one of the most endur-
ing critiques of the country's political and economic problems, Carlo
Levi's majestic Christ Stopped at Eboli. 9 Despite a brief return after 1929 to
the old stance of allowing jobseekers to leave in search of work during
hard times, these policies put an end to large-scale emigration until after
the Second World War, when Italy became the semi-periphery of a
European regional economy dominated by Germany. 10

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

In addition to the flows of emigres from the Soviet Union and Fascist
Italy, major refugee problems developed in the area of the former
Ottoman Empire as Turkey sought to turn itself into a modern, Western-
oriented nation-state under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) .
The old system of "millets," which had guaranteed autonomous self-
government under Ottoman tutelage to the religious communities
under its rule (Muslim, Christian, and Jewish), would have to give way in
the face of growing nationalist sentiment." The Greeks, who had gained
independence from their Muslim overlords already in 1829, took up
arms against the declining Empire in pursuit of the restoration of a
greater Greece straddling the Aegean. These designs inevitably drew in
Bulgaria and Serbia, who also contended for land in Macedonia, with
the overall result that the Balkans became engulfed in wars lasting for
a decade after 1912. For the Armenians, many of whom had enjoyed
prestigious positions under Ottoman rule, the conflicts in the region
had the positive result that they received an independent homeland
(which became a Soviet republic after November 1920) - which they
had lacked, and which might have helped protect them, when the Turks
carried out a genocidal onslaught against them in 1915.

As in the contest of the late 1990s over Kosovo between Serbia and
the region's ethnic Albanian inhabitants, these armed conflicts gave rise
to substantial refugee movements. After a Turkish assault on Smyrna
(Izmir) in September 1922, for example, over a million Anatolian Greek
and Armenian refugees poured into Greece within a few weeks. In the
interest of creating more ethnically homogeneous citizenries on their
respective soils - a project already promoted on the Turkish side, of
course, by the genocide against the Armenians - the Greeks and Turks
soon organized a massive exchange of populations involving some 1.5
million people. Overall, some two million persons became refugees in
the Balkans in the course of the great "unmixing of populations" that
took place in the aftermath of the conflicts associated with the decline of
the Ottoman Empire. 12

In conjunction with the demise of the Dual Monarchy and the
redrawing of boundaries in Austria-Hungary, the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire and the revolutionary transformation of the Russian
Empire gave birth to a number of new states that - against all evidence -
understood themselves as ethnically homogeneous nation-states. The
obvious absurdity of such claims in the "belt of mixed populations" in
Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe resulted in the Minority Treaties
of the early interwar period, which sought to insure certain rights to the
various ethnic groups in the region who failed to achieve recognition as
"state peoples" and who were correspondingly "submerged" under
others who were fortunate enough to do so. In Arendt's view, the "real

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FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

significance of the Minority Treaties lies ... in the fact that they were
guaranteed by an international body, the League of Nations"; because
"the nation had conquered the state," it was now widely held that non-
nationals could not enjoy the rights of citizens, and such rights as they
had would have to be vouched for by some superordinate body. The
thoroughgoing achievement of the nation-state ideal for some peoples
generated a situation in which those who failed in their bid for national
states were compelled to rely for their rights on a supranational organi-
zation, the League of Nations. 13 The League thus appears as sort of deus
ex machina that arose almost of necessity from the triumph of the nation-
state system, and that might help save it from its intrinsic conundrums
and excesses.

These excesses were particularly apparent in the realm of migration.
Many of the migrants forced to leave their homes by the often violent
processes of nation-state-building faced substantial constraints on their
movements as a result of the general antipathies toward foreigners and
the documentary requirements that had been imposed on travelers
throughout Europe during and after the war. Already in 1920, the
League of Nations convened an international conference in Paris to
deal with the difficulties created by the new passport regime and issued
a number of recommendations designed to reduce the unwonted
peacetime restrictions on movement. The 1921 conference of the Inter-
Parliamentary Union in Stockholm expressed its condemnation of the
passport system and called for greater freedom of movement. The pleas
of the participants in these meetings, and those of later such
conferences, fell largely on deaf ears, however. The passport regime had
become broadly institutionalized, complicating the movements of hun-
dreds of thousands of would-be travelers, emigrants, and refugees who
lacked the documentation necessary to establish their identity - or who
had been stripped of the legal nationality they needed to acquire the
proper papers. 14

The League of Nations nonetheless persisted in its efforts to smooth
documentary formalities for immobilized refugees. At the height of the
Russian refugee crisis in early 1922, the League of Nations' High
Commissioner for Refugees, the Norwegian explorer-cum-humanitarian
Frijdtof Nansen, called attention to the problem of travel documents for
refugees in a report to the Council of the League. Then, in July, Nansen
convened in Geneva a conference attended by representatives of sixteen
governments to deal with this matter. The participants joined in the
"Arrangement of 5 July 1922" to create an identification and travel doc-
ument for Russian refugees that would find international acceptance,
which became known simply as the "Nansen passport." According to this
(non-binding) agreement, participating governments could issue the

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

document without thereby committing themselves to granting citizen-
ship rights to the bearer. Governments agreed to recognize the
documents as valid, but at the same time they were not required to
admit their bearers. The Arrangement was a considerable success; by
September 1923, a total of thirty-one governments around the world
had acceded to its terms, and by the end of the decade more than fifty
would do so. 15

Initially, before the documents were extended to other groups,
Nansen passports stated that the bearer was a Russian national, were
valid for one year, and would become invalid if the bearer acquired
another nationality. Despite the fact that many of the recipients of these
certificates were in fact stateless, particularly after the Soviet denational-
ization decree of December 1922, the designation "personne d'origine
russe" was included not only because the recipients were former Russian
nationals but also because "one would not have dared to tell the Russian
emigre that he was without nationality or of doubtful nationality."
Moreover, later attempts to provide uniform identity cards to all stateless
persons were "bitterly contested" by holders of Nansen passports
because they would thus have lost the distinctive mark of their status as
refugees of Russian origin. 16

Yet the demands of the refugee crisis in early interwar Europe led
ineluctably to the extension of the Nansen passport to other groups.
The Armenians - formerly subjects of the Ottomans, the Czarist Empire,
the short-lived independent Armenian Republic, or Soviet Armenia, but
now scattered throughout Europe and Asia Minor - frequently found
themselves similarly ill-positioned to present the passports and identifi-
cation documents demanded of them in their places of would-be refuge.
In May 1924, accordingly, the League of Nations reached another
"Arrangement" granting the Armenians access to Nansen passports.
Nearly forty governments assented to this expansion of international
authority to issue travel documents to the stateless. 17

Despite its obvious usefulness to the Russians and Armenians who
received it, the Nansen passport had serious shortcomings. Chief among
these was the fact that the certificates offered their bearers no guarantee
of (re) admission to the country that had issued the document. In cer-
tain respects this made it rather easy for governments to distribute
Nansen passports; by supplying these documents to would-be travelers,
they could facilitate the departure and international travel of refugees
without assuming any responsibility to take them in at a later time.
In 1926, an intergovernmental conference with participants from
twenty-five countries took an important step toward ameliorating this
deficiency by agreeing to revise the original arrangement to the effect
that Nansen passport-holders would henceforth have the right to have

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FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

a return visa stamped on the certificate. Presumably because this new
provision came dangerously close to granting these refugees rights of
access to territory that were now typically reserved for citizens; however,
only about half of the governments that had acceded to the original
Arrangement endorsed the new agreement. 18

Two years later, the League of Nations took a further step toward giv-
ing certain elements of a kind of supranational citizenship to bearers of
Nansen passports. A new "Arrangement" of 30 June 1928 gave the High
Commissioner for Refugees the authority to perform certain consular
functions on behalf of refugees, including certifying their identity and
civil status, attesting to their character, and recommending them to gov-
ernment and educational authorities. These arrangements were
eventually codified into international law in the 1933 Convention on
Refugees. On the same day, the League also further expanded the list of
groups that could be granted Nansen documents. The groups affected
were principally some 19 000 Assyrians and other Christian minorities
from formerly Ottoman territories. Only thirteen states signed this
accord, however. 19

Despite its shortcomings, the Nansen passport was a notable achieve-
ment in a period that apotheosized the nation-state. The historian
Michael Marrus has referred to this period as "the Nansen era," and
described the significance of the Nansen passport as follows:

For the first time it permitted determination of the juridical status of state-
less persons through a specific international agreement; at a time when
governments and bureaucracies increasingly defined the standing of their
citizens, it nevertheless allowed an international agency, the High
Commission, to act for those whom their countries of origin had rejected. 20

A recent analyst of the origins of modern refugee arrangements has writ-
ten simply: "The beginning of international refugee law can properly be
dated to the creation of the Nansen passport system." 21 Indeed, the
Nansen passport represented the first step toward resolving at the supra-
national level the internal contradictions of a system of movement
controls rooted in national membership. These contradictions were the
underside of the Wilsonian idea of national self-determination that gave
birth to both a number of new nation-states and to the group of "state-
less persons" that so typified the interwar scene in Europe.

The persistence of strictures on movement across national borders
also derived, however, from economic policies that dramatically reversed
the economic liberalism that had underwritten the late nineteenth-
century period of relatively unencumbered movement. During the
interwar period, free trade gave way to protectionism, the constraints of
which helped bring on the Great Depression of the 1930s. Writing about

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

the era of the "national economy" that characterized the interwar
period, Hobsbawm has described the results as follows:

For a few years the world economy itself appeared to be on the verge of
collapse, as the rivers of international migration dried to trickles, high
walls of exchange controls inhibited international payments, interna-
tional commerce contracted, and even international investment showed
momentary signs of collapse. As even the British abandoned Free Trade in
1931, it seemed clear that states were retreating as far as they could into a
protectionism so defensive that it came close to a policy of autarchy, miti-
gated by bilateral agreements. 22

The devotion to liberal economic policies that had lifted the fortunes
of free movement during the nineteenth century had now been aban-
doned. Karl Polanyi trenchandy summed up the situation in these terms:

[Protectionism everywhere was producing the hard shell of the emerging
unit of social life. The new entity was cast in the national mold, but had
otherwise only little resemblance to its predecessors, the easygoing
nations of the past. The new crustacean type of nation expressed its
identity through national token currencies safeguarded by a type of
sovereignty more jealous and absolute than anything known before.

Currencies within, passports without.

Or within, if the country was of the totalitarian variety. Whereas the
labor needs of industry had resulted in occasional acute shortages of
labor until 1932, the famine that resulted from the disastrous collec-
tivization policy of the First Five Year Plan (1928-33) confronted the
regime with the potentially uncontrolled migration of starving peasants
to already overcrowded cities by the end of that year. The Bolsheviks
decided that something had to be done. In a bureaucratic effort to reg-
ulate domestic migration flows, Stalin (re)introduced the internal
passport, which soon became "one of the main levers of social and polit-
ical control in the USSR." 24

Actually, the 27 December 1932 law inaugurating the passport system
was the centerpiece in a broader effort by the regime to stanch the influx
of peasants into the cities. These included a tightening up of the system of
registration for residents of urban areas, with which the passport system
was intimately tied; a law strengthening punishment for absenteeism,
such that workers absent for as little as a day were to be fired, evicted from
enterprise housing, and deprived of their ration cards; decrees designed
to reduce the number of workers receiving rations, diminish abuses of the
rationing system, and connect the distribution of rations directly to work
and the enterprises; and, in the spring of 1933, a directive barring collec-
tive farm workers from leaving rural areas for work in the towns. 25 This
remarkable series of decrees made it increasingly impossible for Soviet

130

FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

citizens to find food or housing unless they were properly registered and
domiciled - which registration, in turn, was vital for receiving a passport
for movement within the USSR. Because these documents constituted the
backbone of a system of controls that linked employment, residence, and
access to goods, the internal passport would come to constitute an essen-
tial part of the everyday life of the Soviet citizen, "the heart of police
power" 26 in the Soviet Union.

Even in democratic societies, however, the strains of global economic
collapse threatened to reverse the achievement of unified national
spaces of free movement. Less well-known than the immigration restric-
tion bills of the 1920s is the fact that, in the 1930s, patrols were set up at
the California borders to keep out hungry escapees from the misery of
the Dust Bowl, who were "deported" immediately if they seemed likely to
become burdens on the public purse. It took until 1941 for the Supreme
Court to invalidate the law authorizing these expulsions, at which time
the court reaffirmed the right to domestic travel as a right of citizen-
ship. 27 In the same year, the United States introduced what would
become the permanent requirement that its departing citizens have a
passport in their possession, at least for travel outside the Western
Hemisphere. As on previous occasions, the obligation initially was con-
ceived as a provisional, wartime measure, and rested on a presidential
proclamation of a national emergency. 28 The immediate emergency that
gave occasion for such a proclamation, of course, was Nazism.

PASSPORTS, IDENTITY PAPERS, AND THE NAZI PERSECUTION OF THE
JEWS

The National Socialists' approach to dealing with their Jewish "problem"
was a complex mixture of the "reactionary" and the "modern." 29 On the
reactionary side, they reintroduced measures for the control of popula-
tion movements and for the identification of persons that were
throwbacks to earlier ages and practices since superseded and left
behind by more democratic governments. And in an era in which
national citizenship had become the sine qua non of access to rights, the
Nazis adopted such reactionary measures as stripping their internal
enemies of their citizenship in order to deprive them of protection and
leave them vulnerable to the persecutions that one could visit upon the
rightless, especially on those lacking a "homeland" state to which they
might appeal for aid.

The "modernist" side of the pincers involved, among other things,
the use of the most advanced techniques of population registration and
documentary controls on movement to keep track of real or putative
enemies and to mobilize the population to achieve the regime's ends.

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

For example, the Nazi government began to construct the administra-
tive machinery for identifying and monitoring the whereabouts of Jews
with a special census of German Jews carried out in conjunction with the
general census of June 1933. This extraordinary count, which aimed to
establish "an overview of the biological and social situation of German
Jewry," determined that there were at that time exactly 16 258 Jews in
Germany who had been born outside the country but who had subse-
quently acquired German citizenship. More broadly, 115 000 foreign or
foreign-born Jews lived in Germany in mid-1 933, a figure representing
twenty-three percent of the total Jewish population. 30

It was against this background that the regime began to undertake
measures to marginalize non-German Jews, such as the denationalization
law of 14 July 1933. The "Law on the Retraction of Naturalizations and the
Derecognition of German Citizenship" empowered the regime to dena-
tionalize anyone who had acquired German citizenship between the end
of the war in 1918 and the day Hitler took power as Reichskanzler in late
January 1933. It was probably not coincidental that this measure, which
took aim at naturalizations carried out by the Weimar government much
reviled by the Nazis, was adopted on Bastille Day (14 July) 1933. The
implementing order for the law made clear that "East European Jews"
were one of its central targets. These recently immigrated groups, many of
whom had come fleeing pogroms in Poland and elsewhere, were the
object of a good part of the regime's earliest "special treatment." Yet of the
Ostjuden who had entered Germany during the Weimar period, as we have
seen, relatively few had acquired citizenship. As a result, "the Nazis were to
discover that even they could not revoke the citizenship of those who were
not citizens." 31 Soon enough, of course, the Nazis would see to it that no
Jews could ever be citizens with the Nuremberg laws of 1935. 32

The 1933 special census of Jews in Germany, however, was only the
beginning of the Nazis' effort to invoke the most sophisticated statistical
and administrative means to pursue its program of racial domination.
The dozen years of existence of the "thousand-year Reich" would gener-
ate a proliferation of censuses, statistical investigations, registers of
foreigners, identity cards, and residence lists that ultimately constituted
the administrative foundation for the deportations to Auschwitz and the
other death camps. Over time, these diverse methods of "embracing"
(erfassen) the German population, and especially certain "negatively
privileged status groups" within it, became intimately linked to the pass-
port system. The reinforcement of "external" forms of identification by
"internal" had important ramifications for many Jews who sought to
leave Germany to escape Nazi oppression.

Despite the regime's outspoken antipathy toward Bolshevism, the
first major move by the National Socialist government in the direction of

132

FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

a firmer embrace of the German population bore remarkable similari-
ties to that taken only two-and-a-half years earlier by the Soviets. On
1 June 1935, the regime reintroduced a type of internal passport known
as the "work-book." The immediate purpose of the work-book was to
permit the more effective allocation of labor by the regime. Initially,
possession of this document applied only to the practitioners of skilled
occupations in which labor shortages existed, but it quickly spread to
other areas as well. Together with the registry based upon all work-books
issued, the little booklet documented the working life of the bearer,
changes of job, periods of unemployment, and any alleged breaches of
work contracts. Through the work-book system, not just the unem-
ployed, but all Germans could theoretically be put under surveillance in
the interest of the well-planned insertion of labor power where the
regime wanted it most. The government later extended this system,
refined to keep track of changes of address, to the entire population
immediately before the Second World War in the form of the "people's
registry" (Volkskartei) . ss

Around the same time, a number of German states required that beg-
gars and vagabonds be in possession of a Vagrants' Registration Book
(Wanderbuch) , a certificate containing a record of the bearer's encoun-
ters with charities and official agencies responsible for the itinerant
poor. (Because "tramping" was regarded as a way of life appropriate only
to men, Registration Books were not issued to women.) Although these
documents had been in existence for a long time, they did not become a
requirement until the Third Reich. Failure to produce the necessary
documents upon the request of the police could result in arrest, which
in turn might land the offender in a charitable asylum, a work-house, or
a concentration camp. As in the case of the work-book, the aim of these
restrictions was to insure that the state would have untrammeled access
to the labor-power of the unemployed and "work-shy," as well as provid-
ing the authorities with greater opportunities to check into a person's
possible criminal background. Despite pressures to create a nationwide
registry of the homeless population, this never came about, and the
effectiveness of the Registration Books as a means of surveillance was
correspondingly limited. After the outbreak of the war in September
1939, however, their issuance was suspended entirely, as vagrancy was
simply declared illegal. 34 As the strictures on internal movement grew
more severe, the documentary controls on movement beyond the
boundaries of the Third Reich became more repressive as well.

The Nazis gave official expression to the intimate connection
between internal and external types of registration and documentary
controls on movement with the "Law on Passports, the Foreigner Police,
and Residential Registration, as well as on Personal Identity Documents"

133

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

of 11 May 1937. The decree gave to the Interior Minister a free hand to
reorganize these administrative areas, collectively referred to as the
"systems of personal identity documents" (Ausweiswesen) . Among the
prerogatives handed to the Interior Minister was the authority to abolish
once and for all the 1867 law of the North German Confederation that
had eliminated passport requirements other than as a temporary, emer-
gency measure, as well as the series of laws from the First World War and
the Weimar period that had been instituted under its terms. 35 The
unceremonious demise of this notable legacy of the late nineteenth-
century era of relatively free movement heralded developments that
would help generate both a massive upsurge of refugees and a project
for controlling movement that ended all movement.

In order to achieve the desired "seamless overview" of the German
population and its peregrinations, the regime implemented the Order
on Residential Registration (Reichsmeldeordnung) of 6 January 1938. This
was the jewel in the crown of thorns created by the Nazis to track the
population, and again bore remarkable similarities to the measures
taken in connection with the introduction of the internal passport in the
Soviet Union during late 1932. The Fuhrer justified the law on the basis
of its contribution "to the protection of the Volksgenossen from criminals
and to facilitating the struggle of the security police against them." In
the interest of more complete compliance with its regulations, the
Order made it easier to fulfill them and eliminated any fees for doing so.
At the same time, penalties for failure to comply were stiffened, includ-
ing jail terms. The registration forms of all non-Germans were
automatically forwarded to the aliens authorities. The Order obliged
the staff of hospitals, youth hostels, and hotels to report their patients
and guests within twenty-four hours to the proper officials. 36

Though these registration requirements were hardly novel, they were
now carried through with an unprecedented thoroughness. Whereas
before 1938 residential registration requirements had been spotty
across the country and evading them was a "popular sport," the
Reichsmeldeordnung created the foundation for the "most complete possi-
ble embrace (Erfassung)" of the entire population. 37 Access to the Jewish
population would especially be facilitated. According to one observer
professionally concerned with such matters, the Reichsmeldeordnung
would henceforth make it "possible to track completely both the exter-
nal and the internal movements of the Jews (Glaubensjuden) ." 38 The
noose was tightening.

Measures such as these were at the heart of the Nazis' efforts to
embrace the German population and to monitor the movements of those
deemed enemies by them, especially Jews. The essence of these efforts was
the requirement that some form of documentation be produced in order

134

FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

to fulfill satisfactorily the reporting obligations. The police chief of
Hamburg, where these measures had been carried out most effectively
before their adoption as the Reich standard, described the benefits of the
system this way:

The principal advantage of the Hamburg registration system consists in
the so-called personal identification obligation (Ausweiszwang) . This
means that all persons wishing to register themselves and their depen-
dents must identify themselves through official documents. Accordingly,
the registry, which can be kept current by way of regular updates from the
local registry offices (Standesdmter) , can be used without further ado for
administrative purposes such as the issuance of passports, driver's licenses,
residence permits . . . etc. 39

The Reichsmeldeordnung thus facilitated a nationwide, homogeneous
approach to insuring that all persons had been captured in the official
web of identification apparatuses.

Not coincidentally, an order of July 1938 required Jews by the end of
that fateful year to acquire an identification card (Kennkarte) indicating
their Jewishness. When they did so, a black mark was to be added to
their cards in the files of the "people's registry." 40 In a further indication
of the direction things were taking, the other group required by the July
1938 law to have an identification card in their possession were men
liable for military service. 41 Shortly thereafter, the Foreigners' Police
Order (Auslanderpolizeiverordnung) generously stated that foreigners
were welcome in the territory of the Reich as long as they demonstrated
that they were "worthy of the hospitality accorded them." The Order
authorized the expulsion, by force if necessary, of all foreigners from
German territory; there were no means of legal redress for an expulsion
order mandated under its terms. 42 This directive above all affected the
Jews who, after all, had either never acquired citizenship or had been
stripped of their citizenship in consequence of the Nuremberg laws. The
Nazi effort to expel these "enemies of the people" was intensifying.

These developments occurred in the immediate aftermath of the
League of Nations conference in Evian, France that had been convened
in early July 1938 to address the growing problem of refugees from
Germany and Austria and their difficulties in finding safe havens of
settlement. The problem of emigration from German-dominated areas
became more severe after the Anschluss of Austria in March, not least as
a result of the enthusiasm of Untersturmfuhrer Adolf Eichmann, who had
been developing plans for large-scale expulsion of Jews since at least
mid-1937. The Nazis' efforts to push the Jews out of their domains soon
led to the creation of a Central Office for Jewish Emigration under
Eichmann's direction. 43 But the Nazis' plans to expel the Jews were not
necessarily consistent with an international system that reserved the

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

right to admit only those whom they chose to admit, a fact that may ulti-
mately have helped to push the Nazis toward extermination as the "final
solution" of the "Jewish problem."

Although all of the delegations to the Evian conference expressed
their commitment to humanitarian assistance, only the Dominican
Republic made a concrete offer of admissions: its representatives hoped
that they could find agricultural settlers for some of the more unpromis-
ing areas of their country. Otherwise, the governmental representatives
at the conference mainly bemoaned the degree to which their countries
had been "saturated" with refugees and pointed to ongoing problems of
unemployment and economic malaise in the course of drawing sharp
limits around their ability to accept more refugees. The conference's
main accomplishment was the creation of the Intergovernmental
Committee on Refugees (IGCR), an organization that came into being
largely because the United States did not wish to work under the aegis of
an organization - the League of Nations - that it had never joined. The
results of the conference were generally regarded as a disappointment. 44

Soon after the Evian conference, the problem of refugees from
German-controlled Europe would worsen dramatically. The Reich
expanded its reach on 1 October by its occupation of the Sudetenland,
in the frontier territory of Czechoslovakia. This extension of Nazi rule
also had the effect of bringing more Jews under German domination, of
course, and thousands of the country's Jews sought to flee their new
overlords. At the Evian conference, a Swiss police official had objected
to the surge of Jewish immigration into Switzerland from Austria after
the Anschluss, to which the Swiss government had responded by impos-
ing a visa requirement on holders of Austrian passports. After
discussions with the German government, the Third Reich on 5 October
required all German Jews to turn in the passports in their possession,
which the regime then returned to them stamped with a red "J." In addi-
tion to the special identity cards Jews were required to carry within
Germany, their travel documents now marked them clearly as Jews when
they sought to traverse international boundaries. Ironically, by putting
potential receiving governments on notice that the bearers of these pass-
ports were "undesirables," this move may well have inhibited the Nazis'
increasingly strenuous efforts to expel Jews from the Reich. 45

Indeed, as of the autumn of 1938, only an estimated one third of the
roughly 500 000 Jews counted in Germany (Altreich) as of mid-1933 had
left the country, despite a growing catalog of laws designed to exclude
Jews from German society and make their lives there more unpleasant.
Yet the pressure on Jews to leave intensified further after Kristallnacht,
the "night of broken glass," on 9 November 1938. After this outbreak of
violence and destruction, it became increasingly difficult to sustain the

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FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

belief that the Nazis would be content merely to marginalize and stig-
matize the Jewish population, and large numbers of Jews now sought to
leave German-controlled Europe.

Did the red "J" make it more difficult for Jews to find refuge outside
Hider's Europe? Over the last twenty years or so, it has become a com-
monplace that many Jews were condemned to death by the immigration
barriers and documentary identification requirements raised by many
countries of Europe and North America during the preceding period,
and by the unwillingness of most countries to admit Jews as refugees, as
suggested by the results of the Evian conference. This view is perhaps most
prominendy associated with the work of the historian David Wyman, but it
has become widely influential. According to the now standard view, the
immigration restrictions that emerged from the First World War and their
strict enforcement during the 1930s in an effort to protect national labor
markets during the depression consigned many Jews to their deaths
because they were unable to find a refuge from Nazi persecution. 46

More recently, William Rubinstein has argued vigorously that the
notion of "paper walls" surrounding the Western democracies - and the
broader claim that the democracies could have rescued more Jews in
various ways, such as by bombing Auschwitz - is an ahistorical myth.
Rubinstein insists that the "paper walls" argument is misguided for a sim-
ple reason. According to him, relatively few Jews left Germany before
Kristallnacht in November 1938 because they believed that this was one
of those periodic outbursts of anti-Semitism that would soon "blow
over." But, in contrast to the claims of the critics of Western policies
toward the Jews, those who did leave Germany found refuge in the
Western countries without great difficulty. What must be understood, in
Rubinstein's view, is that after the beginning of the war in September
1939, the obstacle Jews confronted was no longer that of getting into
other countries, but rather that of getting out of Nazi-controlled Europe.

In order to appreciate Rubinstein's argument,

it is imperative that the Jews of the Nazi Reich must, at all times, be distin-
guished from the 7.5 million Jews of continental Europe who came under
Nazi rule between the outbreak of the war and V-E Day. The Jews of conti-
nental Europe, apart from Germany, were not refugees, either before or after 1939,
were not subject to Nazi rule prior to the coming of the war, or imagined
that they would ever be, let alone that they would be murdered in history's
greatest genocide." 47

In short, the fundamental distinction is that between refugees (from
Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland before September 1939) and
prisoners. For the Jewish prisoners of the Third Reich after 1939,
Rubinstein argues, the only "rescue" from which they might have bene-
fited would have come about through the Allies' swifter prosecution and

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

conclusion of the war against the Nazis. Contrary to the view of critics
such as Wyman, Rubinstein insists, the Allies did as much as they could
(or nearly so) to provide aid and succor to those Jews who actually chose
to flee while they still had the chance to do so.

While there is much that is appealing about Rubinstein's interpreta-
tion, there are also flaws in his argument that render suspect his overall
conclusions. For example, Rubinstein ignores the fact that, during the
first years of the Third Reich, the problem of refugees from Nazism
became sufficiendy serious that the League of Nations moved to inter-
vene. First, already in 1933 the League created the position of High
Commissioner for Refugees from Germany, a post first held by an
American, James G. McDonald, from 1933 to 1935. As a result of German
opposition to the office's activities, however, the High Commissioner was
relegated to a separate institution based in Lausanne rather than in
Geneva, where the League was headquartered. During McDonald's
tenure, the League debated for years whether it should extend the
Nansen passport system to refugees from Germany. In the course of these
discussions, it became apparent that France and Britain were loathe to
annoy Germany, which they wished to appease, and the idea was eventu-
ally shelved. With the issue of travel documents for refugees hung up in
fruidess wrangling, McDonald concentrated his efforts on securing the
admission of refugees. He ultimately facilitated the placement of approxi-
mately two thirds of the 80 000 refugees who left Germany between 1933
and 1935. While that record is not unimpressive, according to these fig-
ures some 27 000 would-be refugees ended up without a place to go. 48

McDonald's successor from 1936 to 1939, a Briton named Neill
Malcolm, pressed the matter of travel documents, however, with the
result that the League adopted an "Arrangement" in July 1936 authoriz-
ing governments to issue travel documents to Germans and stateless
persons coming from Germany who lacked the protection of the German
government. These provisions applied primarily to Jews who had been
denationalized in the aftermath of the adoption of the Nuremberg laws.
This provisional agreement was transformed into a "Convention on the
Status of Refugees Coming From Germany" in February 1938. In due
course, these arrangements were extended to refugees from Austria and
Czechoslovakia as these countries acceded to or fell under Nazi rule.
Clearly, contrary to Rubinstein's reading of the situation, those in the
League of Nations concerned with refugee matters believed that there
was a problem regarding would-be refugees' access to travel documents
that would facilitate their movement across international space, as well as
their access to places of refuge more generally.

Despite this evidence that German and stateless Jews coming from
Germany and elsewhere confronted serious difficulties in departing

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from or finding refuge outside Hitler's domains, Rubinstein rejects the
view that German Jews were ultimately condemned to death at German
hands by the "paper walls" that kept them out. It is true, as Wyman
showed, that between 1933 and 1945 the quotas for immigrants from
Germany (and Austria) were never filled - before 1937 they never
exceeded a quarter of the allotment. It is also true that this fact may be
attributable in part to anti-Semitic attitudes on the part of the consular
officials evaluating the visa applications of Jews in continental Europe.
But in order to evaluate satisfactorily whether other countries took in
Jewish refugees when they presented themselves as asylum seekers, it is
necessary to consider whether the quotas may have been under-filled
because Jews did not seek to take refuge abroad. On the basis of this
kind of evidence, Rubinstein argues that the reason the immigration
quotas to the United States from Germany and Austria remained
unfilled before 1939 was that very many Jews failed to "read the hand-
writing on the wall" and chose not to leave Germany for the United
States in large numbers until after Kristallnacht in November 1938. 49

Perhaps the most sensible conclusion to draw from this debate is this:
like many other groups, Jews confronted significant barriers to admis-
sion into countries of potential safe haven during the 1930s, and the
"paper walls" that had been erected during the early interwar period
complicated the negotiation of international space for all of them. With
the development of new bureaucratic apparatuses since the First World
War, states had become much more effective at identifying possible
interlopers and using documentary restrictions to keep out those they
did not wish to admit. And surely anti-Semitism played some role in
keeping Jews out of potential receiving countries. But this does not in
itself justify the claim that the Allied states could have done a great deal
more than they actually did to "rescue" Jews from the Nazis.

During 1939, the apparatus for "embracing" the population of the
Reich moved into high gear. In order to facilitate the identification of
"racial enemies," after 1 January, all Jews whose given names did not
appear in the "Catalog of Jewish First Names" were required to rein-
scribe at the Registry Office (Standesamt) with the name "Israel" or
"Sarah." 50 In February of 1939, as noted previously, the regime ordered
the expansion of the "people's registry," which henceforth was to
include an entry for each and every person in the population.
According to the bureaucratic administrators charged with keeping the
registry, its purpose was to enable the Nazi regime to mobilize the entire
population in the event of war. 51 Then, in May, the Third Reich carried
out a census that constituted "the capstone in the 'embrace' of the Jews."
In addition to the census form itself, a supplementary card introduced
at the behest of the Wehrmacht and the security forces under Reinhard

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

Heydrich was to be filled out as well. The purpose of the card was to give
the security forces a clearer overview of the Jewish population and the
army a better picture of the training of its potential inductees. 52

The Reich Statistical Office, which carried out the census, thus per-
formed vital services in fulfilling what Heydrich, after assuming the
position of Reichsprotektor in Czechoslovakia, bombastically (but not
altogether inaccurately) described as "the fighting tasks in the adminis-
trative sector." Heydrich understood that the precondition for what he
called the "task of achieving the idea" was not merely "a superficial see-
ing, but rather a thorough grappling with (Befassen) and grasp (Erfasseri)
of things." 53 To achieve these aims, the tasks of counting, identifying,
registering, and tracking became central activities of the German occu-
pying forces wherever they went.

After the conquest of Poland in early September 1939, the Nazi regime
stiffened the existing regulations of the Reichsmeldeordnung concerning
identification and registration and extended them to its newly acquired
territories. The justification was the usual one that "precise surveillance of
persons' movements" was essential to the defense of the "fatherland in
danger." 54 Those taking occupancy of or leaving a dwelling now had to
report their movements within three days, rather than the previous peace-
time requirement of one week; foreigners as well as stateless persons, who
before had been on the same legal footing as Germans in this respect, had
to register their assumption of new quarters or their departure from old
ones within twenty-four hours. In response to Gestapo allegations of non-
compliance by the so-called "Polish-Jewish criminal and political criminal
element," the penalties for transgression of these regulations were
stiffened. Thenceforward, according to a letter from the chief of the
province of Upper Silesia, those in the occupied Eastern territories who
failed to report themselves to the proper authorities, or who made false
declarations when doing so, were to be sent to a concentration camp. 55

With the occupation of Poland in September 1939, of course, the Nazis
assumed control over a Jewish population of several million, as well as of a
Slavic people that they regarded as racially inferior. At this point, their
plans for population engineering and ethnic resettlement of the Eastern
territories remained uncertain. The ultimate fate of the Jews - that is, the
meaning the Nazis would give to the notion of a "final solution" of the
Jewish question - remained indeterminate. Christopher Browning has
argued that, between the seizure of Poland in 1939 and the invasion of the
Soviet Union in 1941, the Nazis' plans for the Jews focused on two chief
projects: their resettlement to the Lublin Reservation (the region
between the Bug and the Vistula rivers) or the seemingly even more
bizarre "Madagascar Plan," under which the Jews of Europe would be
eliminated by shipping them to the remote island off the African coast.

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Yet these undertakings were caught up in a broad project for the
racial reorganization of eastern Europe, and accordingly at times the
resolution of the "Jewish problem" had to take a back seat to the dis-
placement of the Poles or the setdement of ethnic Germans in their
stead. As a result of the "frustration that had built up over the bottle-
necks of demographic engineering in eastern Europe" since the
conquest of Poland, the Madagascar plan came to seem particularly
appealing. But the implementation of that plan required the defeat not
just of France - which the Germans achieved by the summer of 1940 -
but also of Great Britain, and it soon became apparent that this was not
going to happen very quickly. "The greater the frustration, the lower the
threshold to systematic mass murder," Browning writes. "Thus the
Madagascar Plan was an important psychological step toward the Final
Solution." By the time of Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the
USSR) in mid-1941, the Nazis' frustration about the Jewish question had
reached boiling point. As they overran more territories with large Jewish
populations, their tendency to equate "Jewish" and "Bolshevik" facili-
tated their treatment of Jews in the same manner that they treated
Bolsheviks: summarily. The Einsatzgruppen were unleashed, and by
October plans had been adopted to deport Jews to death camps
equipped with poison gas facilities. During the same month, Jewish emi-
gration from Germany was finally forbidden. The extermination of
European Jewry had begun. 56

The Nazis had by this time simplified the process of identifying and
"embracing" the Jews by reverting to one of the oldest methods of anti-
Jewish discrimination - the requirement that they were a distinguishing
mark, the Yellow Badge. First introduced in the Government General of
Poland in late 1939, a decree of 1 September 1941, mandated that the
Yellow Badge was henceforth to be worn by all Jews above the age of six
in Germany, the Polish provinces, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia. This measure was in part a response to the fact that, as a French
police official pointed out, travel restrictions on Jews and "Negroes"
introduced by the Nazis in France could only be fully enforced against
the latter because of their relatively easy identification on the basis of
skin pigmentation. The badge facilitated the isolation and segregation
of Jews "as well as strict control of their movements and activities." 57

The imposition of the badge met with significant resistance not only
in the Western occupied countries, especially in France, Holland, and
Belgium, but also in Czechoslovakia. Even in Germany, where the order
requiring Jews to wear the badge was widely welcomed by the "Aryan"
population, it also generated considerable consternation, especially
among practicing Christians. The severe penalties for transgressions of
the requirements, however, resulted in more thorough compliance with

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

the regulations in the East. With the identification and segregation of Jews
made easier by this distinguishing mark, the deportations from Germany
to the East began on 16 September 1941. 58 The thoroughly "modern" pro-
ject of a systematic extermination of European Jewry, which depended to
a great extent on the mobilization of advanced administrative means, also
relied for its implementation on some of the most "reactionary" methods
of discriminating between "us" and "them." 59

Just as there was opposition to the Jewish star, the Nazis' more mod-
ern attempts to achieve a firm grasp on the Jewish population met with
resistance as well. Despite their efforts, the Nazis were unable to achieve
full compliance with the requirements regarding identification papers
and registration with the authorities. In 1942, Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler
complained that significant portions of the population failed to carry
official documents with photographs, such as passports and identity
cards, as they were required to do by law. In response, he announced his
intention to undertake a renewed campaign to remind the populace of
these requirements. 60

Beyond noncompliance with such regulations, resistance to the
German occupation in other countries sometimes focused directly on its
bureaucratic methods. For example, cases of arson and raids on the
offices responsible for population registration swelled during 1943 and
1944 in the Netherlands. In January 1944, Himmler received a letter
from a high official of the occupation regime there reporting
that attempts to update the population registry had resulted in the dis-
tribution of critical leaflets, attacks on registry officials, and the
pronouncement of death sentences against them. 61 It was not lost on
occupied and terrorized populations that the systems of identification
and registration were vital to the implementation of the Nazis' designs
for mastery of Europe and its racial purification.

Passports, identification cards, population registries, and visible distin-
guishing marks intended to keep watch on and control the movements of
Germany's population came to constitute an interlocking if not flawless
system of registration and tracking. These mechanisms facilitated the
task of locating and monitoring Jews, with the ultimate result that they
were available for extermination. All this supports Rubinstein's notion
that, after September 1939, the Jews of Europe were prisoners of Hitler's
regime. In a dramatized version of the last days of Adolf Eichmann, play-
wright Heinar Kipphardt has the Israeli prison warden ask Adolf
Eichmann, "as an expert," what the Jews could have done to avoid the
fate the Nazis had planned for them. Eichmann's response:

Disappear, disappear. Our vulnerable point was if they had disappeared
before we had been able to register (erfassen) and concentrate them. Our

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FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

commandos were terribly understaffed, and even if the police in the vari-
ous countries had helped us with all their strength, the Jews had at least a
fifty-fifty chance. Massive flight would have been a catastrophe for us. 62

As we have seen, especially after 1937, the Nazis did their best to avert
such a "catastrophe."

In order to carry out their "final solution" - whether that entailed
expulsion, as at first, or extermination - the Nazis needed, and did their
utmost to build up, a massive administrative machinery for identifying
and "embracing" the population. These identification mechanisms
helped both to keep the war machine fed with recruits and to identify
and separate off enemies of the Volk, particularly the Jews. Documents
such as identity cards and passports were essential elements of this
system, and while it is not clear that Jews suffered disproportionately
from the "paper walls" erected by the countries of the North Atlantic
world after the First World War, their negotiation of international space
was hardly facilitated by those barriers, either. These facts would not be
forgotten in postwar German debates about passport controls, nor in
broader European efforts to reduce the stringency of documentary
controls on movement.

LOOSENING UP: PASSPORT CONTROLS AND REGIONAL INTEGRATION
IN POSTWAR EUROPE

The close of the Second World War confronted those involved in the reg-
ulation and facilitation of movement with a daunting task. 63 The number
of Europeans displaced by the Second World War has been estimated at
approximately 30 million, of whom some 11 million found themselves
outside their countries of origin at war's end. Postwar conflicts in Eastern
and Southern Europe, in turn, generated further flows of refugees. A
considerable number of these massive groups of migrants were settled
relatively expeditiously. This was mainly because of the dynamics of the
largest flow: millions of ethnic Germans, whether old settlers or new, who
were retreating with the German armies or expelled from several coun-
tries in Eastern Europe were accommodated in one of the two states then
taking shape in the Allied-occupied zones of Germany. Yet many others,
not least about two million subjects of the Soviet regime who often had
little sympathy for Communism and hence little desire to return to
Stalin's domains, remained outside their home countries and in need of
assistance to negotiate their way across international space.

Already during the Second World War, international efforts were
undertaken to facilitate the movements of the enormous wave of
refugees uprooted by the conflict. Earlier exertions led by the American
and British governments were consolidated in 1943 under the aegis of

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).
That agency, however, fell prey to the bickering among the Second
World War allies that would soon come to be known as the Cold War.
Although UNRRA certainly helped in the process of repatriating many
displaced persons after the war, a considerable portion of the responsi-
bility was handled, however unwillingly, by the Allied military forces.
According to Michael Marrus, the Allied command repatriated 5.25 mil-
lion displaced persons to Western European countries during May and
June 1945 alone, a rate of more than 80 000 per day. 64 The documentary
obligations that DPs had to fulfill are likely to have been relatively mini-
mal in a situation of this magnitude.

Soon thereafter, the International Refugee Organization (IRO) was
established in 1946 to minister to the needs of "the last million"
European refugees, and was scheduled to go out of existence in 1951
upon completion of that task. Like the UNRRA, the IRO became entan-
gled in Cold War disputes reflecting divergent foreign policy strategies
of the two superpowers that would profoundly shape subsequent inter-
national responses to refugee problems. The IRO was succeeded after
the creation of the United Nations in 1949 by the UN High
Commissioner's Office for Refugees (UNHCR) .

Despite the fact that two major refugee crises outside Europe had arisen
since V-E Day - some 14 million persons set in motion by the partition of
India and Pakistan in 1947, and several hundred thousand Palestinians
associated with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 - UNHCR was at
first exclusively concerned with displaced Europeans. A separate institu-
tion, the UN Relief for Palestinian Refugees, was created to deal with the
latter crisis, and ad hoc arrangements were developed to deal with other
refugee crises elsewhere. Gradually, however, UNHCR came to regard the
rest of the (non-Palestinian) world as its mandate. In its founding charter,
UNHCR took over the novel notion adopted by the IRO that individual
refugees had rights irrespective of their nationality, a feature that consti-
tuted a major shift from the prewar approach that treated refugees in
terms of their membership in national groups. At the same time, in order
to reduce the range of its jurisdiction, UNHCR was relieved of responsibil-
ity for the stateless. 65 Under the terms of the Refugee Convention of 1951,
contracting states are enjoined to issue travel documents to refugees and
asylum-seekers in their territories who might find themselves in need of
such documents. In certain circumstances, the International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC) may issue an emergency one-way travel docu-
ment for humanitarian purposes, although foreign-country immigration
officials are not obliged to recognize such documents. 66

Efforts to reduce the severity of the passport regime inherited from
the interwar period were being made at the national level as well during

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FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

this time. Even before the war had officially ended, Belgium and
Luxembourg had exchanged notes aimed at reducing passport controls.
By 1950, the Netherlands joined this effort and nationals of the three
countries were given the right to travel among them with only a national
identity card. In mid-1954, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland
agreed that their nationals could travel without passports or other travel
documents when traveling among those countries, and that such
persons no longer needed to be in possession of a residence permit
when residing in a Scandinavian country other than their own. These
arrangements were extended by a 1957 Convention that provided for
the elimination of passport controls at the internal frontiers of these
Scandinavian countries (which thus implicidy extended the freedom of
movement to non-nationals traveling among these countries). 67 These
agreements had wider influence, encouraging the Tourism Committee
of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (forerunner
of the OECD) to conclude "that the final goal, the pure and simple
abolition of passports, is not merely a Utopian aim." 68

In the interim, one of the main objectives of the advocates of liberal-
ized movement in Europe was the creation of a European passport. The
proponents of a European passport have had to fight tooth and nail
against the tribunes of national sovereignty, however. The Secretary-
General of the Council of Europe, a strong supporter of the idea of a
European passport as a symbol of a unified continent, inquired of
Europe's national governments in the early 1950s as to their position
concerning the possibility of creating such a document. The replies he
received indicated that those governments were not yet prepared to
forgo their national passports, but would prefer to see simply a stan-
dardization of national passports. Accordingly, the Council's Committee
of Experts on Passports and Visas abandoned the broader aim of a
European passport for the time being, and instead submitted proposals
to the Committee of Ministers toward the more limited end of standard-
ization in March 1952. 69 As late as the mid-1980s, the CDU government
of West Germany felt compelled to defend the incipient introduction of
the European passport by reminding the Bundestag that it would remain
"legally a national passport." 70

Similarly, the advocates of passportless travel within Europe have
struggled mightily against the surveillance preoccupations of the police
bureaucracies. In response to the negative replies of the member
governments to the Council of Europe's inquiries regarding the cre-
ation of a European passport, the Council asked its Legal Committee to
assess the effectiveness of the existing system of passport controls. In its
1953 report, the Legal Committee suggested that the passport control
systems of the various states were largely ineffective in achieving control

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

over the entry of undesirable persons into their territories and the exit
of those of their nationals whose departure they wished to hinder, and
that these purposes could be achieved by other available means in any
case. The Legal Committee also found the system to be a source of con-
siderable inconvenience. In view of the delays entailed by passport
controls at the frontiers of European countries, it concluded that
"despite the remarkable technical achievements of the twentieth cen-
tury, the journey from Paris to London by rail and sea could be done in
less time at the beginning of the century than in 1953. " 71

The preoccupation with surveillance that was inspired by the notion
of national sovereignty was strikingly in evidence in the debates over the
first passport law of the fledgling Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).
First, the adoption of the new law was a symbolically important element
of the broader quest for sovereignty of the new German state. The pro-
posal for a new passport law had been occasioned by the early 1950
notification by the Allied occupying powers, under whose authority such
matters had remained since the end of the war, that they were prepared
to restore this prerogative to the West German government. The Allies
nonetheless reserved to themselves the right to deny the issuance of a
passport to those included in the blacklists they were keeping. Although
these reservations were a matter of particular concern to Communists,
against whom the blacklists were primarily directed, a number of
Bundestag deputies and the Interior Minister himself noted that this
infringement on the authority of the Federal Republic constituted "a
limitation of our sovereignty which is, over the longer term, incompati-
ble with partnership on an equal footing." 72 The adherents of this view
regarded control over the distribution of passports as a central attribute
of national independence, akin to the authority to issue a unique cur-
rency. Then as now, state-builders see the authority to issue one's own
passport as a vital element of sovereignty.

Against the background of the emerging Cold War, the achievement of
the sovereignty of a West German state also entailed the hardening of the
separation between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic
Republic (GDR), a development that many Germans were reluctant to
countenance. The Communists of Western Germany were particularly
loathe to let the two states drift apart, hoping that some settlement could
be achieved under conditions more favorable to Communist aims.
Despite its basic commitment to German unity, however, Konrad
Adenauer's Christian Democrat Union (CDU) had instead chosen to wait
out the Cold War until such time as a more congenial government came
to power in East Berlin and paved the way for reunification under non-
Communist auspices. In the meanwhile, the CDU adopted a strategy
whereby it accepted the deepening division of the two Germanys while

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FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

trying to avoid conceding the sovereign legitimacy of the East German
regime. The Hallstein Doctrine, which punished foreign governments
that established diplomatic relations with the GDR, reflected this funda-
mental aspect of early West German foreign policy.

This basic approach to "intra-German" affairs found expression in
the new passport law in several ways. First, the law's backers insisted that
East Germans were not required to have passports to enter the territory
of the Federal Republic from the GDR, because they were not aliens: the
FRG never conceded the existence of a separate East German citizen-
ship. Similarly, West Germans were not obliged to have a passport to
enter the territory of the GDR (though the GDR might require them for
entry), because it was not held to be "foreign territory." The fundamen-
tal reason for these provisions, according to the government, was that
the frontier between the two states was "not an external border, but
merely a demarcation line of the occupying powers." 73 In view of the fact
that no peace treaty had been signed to conclude the Second World
War, this posture was on solid legal ground.

Second, the government had initially proposed that all persons cross-
ing a border in either direction between the Federal Republic and a
foreign country - that is, countries other than the GDR - have a visa in
order to do so. Critics of the government's version, including the power-
ful Industrie- und Handelstag (analogous to the American Chamber of
Commerce), challenged the need for a visa requirement for Germans.
Ultimately, the Government was able to get agreement only on the
notion that the Interior Minister was authorized to require, at his discre-
tion, a visa requirement for foreigners entering and leaving the Federal
Republic. This arrangement helped to sustain the notion that
"Germans" East and West remained part of one coherent space of free
movement, while consolidating more securely the dividing line between
"Germans" and foreigners. 74

The issue of the passport's enhancement of the state's surveillance
capabilities also occupied a prominent place in the debates over the 1952
law. Again, this was a matter of special concern to the Communists in the
Bundestag. Communist deputies pointed particularly to the paragraph
that gave the government the authority, when it deemed "public security
or the constitutional democratic order" threatened, to mandate special
conditions for entry or exit from the FRG, as well as the clause permitting
it routinely to deny passports to those who "endanger the internal or
external security of the Federal Republic." According to the Communists,
these clauses would be used principally against them, as could be seen in
past abuse of such laws. A Social Democratic deputy reinforced these
claims, asserting that these provisions aimed chiefly at restricting the free-
doms of Communists even as leading Nazi functionaries had been

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

permitted to come and go as they pleased. 75 The Communists had good
reason for their fears: the United States government had just adopted a
clause denying passports to Communists in section 6 of the Internal
Security Act (also known as the Subversive Activities Control Act, or
McCarran Act) of 1950. 76

In addition to the restrictions motivated by Cold War concerns, the
government's proposed law included bizarre throwbacks to restrictions
on movement typical of the early nineteenth century. Its initial section
11 proposed penalties, including a possible one-year jail term, for those
who diverged from the route or destination prescribed in a German visa.
The aforementioned Social Democrat pilloried the absurd circum-
stances to which such a clause could give rise with a small tale about a
German vacationer in Switzerland who, deciding along the way to go to
Geneva rather than Zurich, as well as to make a little side trip to
Chamonix in France, would have twice violated the law as first submit-
ted. 77 The final version of the law imposed these penalties only on
foreigners crossing the borders of the Federal Republic, or temporarily
resident within them.

There was something odd about the government's preoccupation
with the surveillance of travelers. In the course of his remarks introduc-
ing the proposed law, the West German Interior Minister - the same
official who was to be responsible for its implementation - delivered
himself of a quite radical critique of passport controls. Anticipating the
above-described findings of the Legal Committee of the Council of
Europe, the minister averred:

All the experts essentially recognize that the really dangerous people
almost always find a way to get in and out. Passport requirements, and
especially visa requirements, thus result in a heavy burden on the move-
ment of the broad mass of innocent travelers. An enormous - and largely
useless - administrative effort is expended trying to get a few wrongdoers
by issuing millions of passports and visas to innocent people. 78

Yet the Interior Minister went on to defend the law as necessary to the
security of the Federal Republic and successfully shepherded it through
the Bundestag. Apparently no amount of sense could persuade the law's
supporters that passports were of marginal value (at considerable cost)
in enhancing public security. The German Interior Minister's remarks
concerning the inefficacy of passport controls for the "really dangerous
people" recall the despondency of US Immigration Service inspector
Frank Berkshire when called upon to implement passport controls
along a largely unguarded 2000-mile border in the period after the First
World War: 79 passports can only regulate the movements of those who
are prepared to subject themselves to passport checks. Those who know

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FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

how to avoid border checkpoints will not need to furnish themselves
with the legitimate "means of movement." Even if the Interior Minister's
actions belied his words, it is difficult to imagine anyone in a similar
position of responsibility dismissing the usefulness of passports in
today's pervasive atmosphere of "crisis" in immigration matters.

An earlier immigration "crisis" already loomed on the horizon for
Great Britain after the close of the war, rooted in the privileged rights of
access of British colonial subjects to the imperial center. The process of
freeing colonies that were increasingly regarded as anomalous and unten-
able gathered steam on the heels of a war that had been fought at least in
part against the idea of domination by foreigners. With the British
Nationality Act of 1948, each of the countries of the Commonwealth was
to set its own citizenship laws, although citizens of Commonwealth coun-
tries were to enjoy a shared status of British subjecthood (also known as
Commonwealth citizenship). While each of the Commonwealth states was
permitted to continue the long standing practice of establishing its own
citizenship and immigration policies with respect to other member states,
the UK itself remained open to all comers from its overseas dominions: "it
was the only one-way street in the commonwealth." 80

In addition, although the Republic of Ireland was not a member of
the Commonwealth, it concluded arrangements for a passport union
with the UK that allowed for passportless travel between the two coun-
tries of their respective nationals. Finally, in order to ease access to the
UK to travelers from the countries of northwest Europe, the govern-
ment adopted in 1960 a facility known as the British Visitor's Card. The
card, which was printed in England for the British Travel Association,
was distributed free of charge to travel agencies in the countries with
which the United Kingdom had concluded an agreement for the docu-
ment's use. These travel agencies would provide the would-be traveler
with a Visitor's Card upon request. Agreements to use the Visitor's Card
were made with Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, France,
Switzerland, and the Federal Republic of Germany. The laxity of these
arrangements, which gave the authority to issue a passport-like travel
document to people with an economic incentive to encourage travel,
must have made the UK's borders seem dangerously vulnerable to many
concerned with such matters. 81

Efforts to end this vulnerability came first in the form of the
Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962. Under the Act, the rights of
British subjects to enter the UK were substantially limited. It mandated
that citizens of the Republic of Ireland, British Protected Persons, and
many Commonwealth citizens became subject to immigration controls.
As a result of the legislation, only three categories of persons were enti-
tled to enter the United Kingdom freely: persons born in the United

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

Kingdom; persons holding a United Kingdom passport who were also cit-
izens of the United Kingdom and colonies; and, finally, Commonwealth
citizens who held such a passport issued in the United Kingdom or the
Republic of Ireland. The purpose here was clearly to stanch what had
been a steady inflow of non-white migrant labor from the Caribbean and
the Indian subcontinent during the 1950s. 82 This legislation is especially
peculiar in that - as a consequence of the crazy-quilt and jerry-built pat-
tern of allegiances and privileges characteristic of the Commonwealth -
it makes possession of a passport in certain cases the foundation for the
applicability or not of immigration laws, rather than immigration laws
the basis for the obligation to carry a passport. Underlying this set of
dispensations was the notion of British subjecthood with close ties to the
metropolis (viz., Commonwealth citizens who hold a UK passport issued
in the UK or Ireland) .

This principle became the foundation for an extraordinary set of
immigration proposals occasioned by the prospect of the immigration of
several thousand UK passport holders from Kenya in 1967-68. The
Kenyan government had announced plans to "Kenyanize" the country's
economic life, sending the considerable Asian population into a panic
and into the arms of Great Britain, of which they were nationals. In
response to the impending arrival of 7000 of these unfortunates, the
Secretary of State for Home Affairs proposed on 22 February 1968, to
introduce a bill to bring "under immigration control citizens of the United
Kingdom holding United Kingdom passports who have no substantial
connection with this country." This was an inventive but ominous oxymoron
that would have made refugees of these Commonwealth citizens, for
they had acquired their UK passports perfectly legitimately in the course
of the negotiations over Kenyan independence in 1963. Those agree-
ments had exempted the Asian Kenyans who were UK nationals from
the terms of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962.

The Home Affairs secretary was looking down the road, perhaps, at
over a million people potentially able to enter the UK free of immigra-
tion controls, but he seems to have grasped the relative novelty, at least
in a putatively democratic country, of what he was doing. In the course
of his remarks introducing the bill to the House of Commons, the
Secretary asserted: "This is a unique situation. There has been no prece-
dent for it, as far as I know. This will be the first occasion on which
legislation of this sort has been proposed." It was not exacdy the first
time such a thing had been proposed, of course. An order of 25
November 1941 had stripped of their German citizenship all Jews domi-
ciled abroad and confiscated their property in Germany, making
refugees of them as well. 83

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FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

The precarious situation of the Kenyan Asians of British nationality
became especially clear when the government of India, a likely alterna-
tive destination, made clear that it would refuse them admission, "not by
way of retaliation but to emphasize [to the UK government] the urgent
necessity of allowing persons their rights of citizenship irrespective of
the country of origin." The International Commission of Jurists called
the Act "racist" and characterized by "unprecedented discrimination by
creating a category of British citizens deprived of the right to enter the
territory of a country of which they are nationals." The outcry forced
the British to back off from parts of this scheme and led them to provide
vouchers permitting repatriation to the UK to British Overseas Citizens,
British Subjects (without citizenship), and British Protected Persons
who were not dual nationals. 84

Still, the episode made dramatically clear the extreme explosiveness
of the racial politics of passports in the decolonizing United Kingdom,
as well as the broader problem of who among the varieties of British sub-
jects was to have unrestricted access to the territory of the UK The
British government addressed the matter of access to its territory in the
Immigration Act of 1971, a comprehensive statute that introduced the
categories of "patrial" and "non-patrial" and abolished the distinction
between aliens and Commonwealth citizens that had previously gov-
erned entry and settlement in Great Britain. Thenceforth, only
"patrials" had the right to enter Britain, although there were some sub-
stantial exceptions, such as citizens of member-countries of the EEC.
The law had significant racial implications, because "patrials" were
defined in such a way as to include the progeny of white people who
migrated from Britain to most of its overseas possessions while excluding
many whose Commonwealth citizenship would once have given them
access to British soil. Non-patrials wishing to gain entry to Britain were
required "to obtain a work permit issued by the Department of
Employment for a specific job with a specific employer for a specific
period of time." "Non-patrials," in other words, were transformed into
guest workers. Despite the fact that the law actually expanded the num-
ber of those eligible for admission to Great Britain, its main target was to
limit the access of non-whites to the territory. 85 Subsequent experience
suggests that the law has not been very successful in achieving this aim.

The issues that provoked a postwar revision of Italian passport law
concerned not so much getting in but — as usual in Italy - getting out.
The law as proposed had, in fact, nothing whatever to do with entry into
Italy by foreigners. Instead, the statute aimed to modernize various
aspects of Italian passport legislation and to bring that legislation into
conformity with clauses of the postwar Italian Constitution guaranteeing

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

the freedom of citizens to leave and return to Italy. In particular, the law
sought to remove from the realm of administrative discretion both the
matter of the issuance of passports to particular persons and that of
determining where they could go once supplied with a passport.

With respect to the latter issue, the 1967 law provided that passports
were to be valid for all countries whose government Italy recognized,
eliminating the potential for arbitrariness (and the extra work) involved
in having to list the acceptable countries in each case. This provision
excluded only four countries from the choice of possible destinations
for Italians: China, [North] Korea, Vietnam, and the German
Democratic Republic. The first three spots blacked out on the map are
likely to have been included in deference to the foreign policy wishes of
the United States; the presence there of the GDR probably reflected the
Italian government's reluctance to violate the Hallstein Doctrine, which,
as noted earlier, called for retaliation by the West German government
against any country that established diplomatic relations with East
Berlin. In this as in other respects, the passport law eventually adopted
in late 1967 derived from Italy's status as a semiperipheral labor
exporter, especially to Germany and the United States.

At the same time, references in discussion of the law to the "rapid
progress of tourism" suggest that Italy's own "economic miracle" was tak-
ing hold, drawing more Italians into the widening stream of pilgrims to
the wonders of the world. 86 The 1967 law only rationalized practices that
had been going on de facto throughout the postwar period, for Italian
labor had been a critical factor in the postwar economic booms in
France and Germany. The freedom of Italian workers to take up employ-
ment in the more developed parts of Europe, undergirded by a
deepening commitment to free labor mobility in the countries of the
European Communities, surely contributed to economic improvements
at home as well. In this respect, changes in Italian passport policies sim-
ply reflected broader trends toward easier mobility that were afoot in the
European Community.

The drive toward greater freedom of movement in postwar Europe
has been intimately connected with the effort to create a common mar-
ket, and especially with the desire of the various states to "have recourse
to manpower available in the territory of any other Contracting Party." 87
In 1957, article 48 of the treaty creating the European Economic
Community proposed to eliminate controls on movement within the
Community for nationals of its member states. Numerous agreements
toward this end have been adopted in the intervening period in the
form of bi- or multilateral arrangements as well as by supranational
organizations such as the Council of Europe, the European Coal and
Steel Community, the EEC, and the European Union. The so-called

152

FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

Schengen Accords of 1985, mandating passportless travel for European
Community nationals between France, Germany, and the Benelux coun-
tries, were the instruments ultimately designed to achieve the goal of
unrestricted, passportless travel within Europe. Other countries have
joined the accords in the meantime. Yet France, in particular, has been
persistently skittish about giving up its national passport and reluctant
about implementing the agreements.

The Federal Republic of Germany, by contrast, has generally been in
the forefront of support for the project of European unification. Yet the
West German government's enthusiasm for introducing the European
passport, a matter debated in the legislature in the mid-1980s, may have
had as much to do with the license it provided for introducing machine-
readable control documents as with its value as a symbol of European
unity. The government's desire to use this technology, along with the
intimate relationship between new legislation on passports and personal
identity cards, provoked a donnybrook debate in the Bundestag. Much of
the controversy resulted from the presence in German politics of a new
force that was disinclined to ignore the centrality of personal identifica-
tion documents to the functioning of Nazism, namely the Greens.
Accordingly, a good deal of the discussion swirled around the increas-
ingly salient issue in German politics of "data protection" (Datenschutz) ,
for the Greens' deputies harshly criticized the extent to which the per-
sonal information gathered in the course of issuing passports could be
used for surveillance purposes by the government. In addition, more
fundamental doubts were once again raised about the effectiveness of
passport controls in controlling undesirables, among whom terrorists
were uppermost in the minds of the more conservative deputies. 88

In the end, however, those eager to stamp out the "terrorist threat"
got their way, and the Federal Republic adopted machine-readable and
(allegedly) unfalsifiable passports. A notable intermingling of domestic
and international pressures underlay the adoption of the law. Personal
identity cards had become increasingly acceptable as a substitute for a
passport in intra-European travel, and the West German government
had already moved toward introducing (putatively) non-falsifiable,
machine-readable versions of those cards. In consequence, the govern-
ment was loathe to forgo the "gain in security" thus achieved by allowing
the passport to remain at a lower technological standard. If it had done
so, a German traveler exiting from the Federal Republic would have
been able to leave the country with a document regarded by the author-
ities as less reliable than the identity cards. 89

From our current vantage point, perhaps the most striking feature of
the law and the debate over its adoption was that, like the 1967 Italian
passport legislation, it had virtually nothing to do with immigration. The

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

similarity between the two pieces of legislation stops there, however. As
noted previously, the Italian regulations, reflecting Italy's subordinate
position in the regional and global economic system, were primarily
concerned with facilitating departure. The German law, in contrast,
expressed a long-standing (if hardly unbroken) preoccupation with
surveillance and internal security.

Despite the lack of concern about immigration in the 1985-86
debates over the new West German passport law, worries about the vul-
nerability of the outer boundaries of the European Community have
risen with the loosening of its internal borders. In late 1986, for exam-
ple, the British Home Secretary, expressing fears obviously rooted in the
UK's own experience with these matters, proposed the tightening of the
Community's external controls as internal controls are relaxed. The
Community responded by announcing the creation of a working group
to explore these issues. 90 To be sure, as one commentator has put it:
"The European communities have been instrumental in eroding the
stringent passport control which has gripped Europe for the last fifty
years." 91 But this has scarcely meant the end of passport and similar con-
trols on cross-border movements in Europe.

Accordingly, one of the most important consequences of regional inte-
gration in Europe has been a heightened attentiveness to racial
distinctions, at least on the part of the guardians of national borders. If
travelers are not routinely required to produce documents demonstrating
their nationality, and the continent is perceived by many of its inhabitants,
however anachronistically, as "white," visible markers thought to signal
membership grow in importance as reasons for suspecting that a person
may be liable to movement controls as a non-national of the Community's
member states. Skin color, hair, and the other stigmata of racial identity
unavoidably move to the fore as means of identifying outsiders.

This background must be borne in mind if one is to evaluate satisfacto-
rily the contemporary concern that states may be "losing control" of
their borders. 92 These claims generally rest on two principal arguments:
that liberal states are hamstrung by humanitarian concerns such as
pressures for family reunification and the growing unpalatability of
restrictive measures such as deportation, and that states lack the admin-
istrative capacity to control inflows of people. 93 While the arguments
about humanitarian concerns certainly have some validity, this is hardly
tantamount to saying that states lack the means to interdict unwanted
immigrants or to use those means when they wish to do so.

With the loosening of the internal borders in the European
Community as a result of the Schengen accords, for example, worries
about the vulnerability of its outer boundaries have risen sharply and

154

FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

corresponding measures have been taken. Indeed, migration scholar
Anthony Richmond has recently argued that "the most economically
developed and affluent countries are banding together to protect their
privileged position in much the same way that Afrikaners and others of
European descent sought to maintain their dominance in South Africa"
- not least with a variety of documentary controls on movement. 94 Much
of the recent concern about unwanted immigration within the
European Union has been focused on Italy as the perceived "weak link"
in the Schengen countries' defenses against undesirables. In response,
Italy recently adopted a new immigration law designed to tighten docu-
mentary requirements, penalize both illegal immigrants and migrant
smugglers, and make deportations of illegals more swift and certain. 95
The continuing importance of national identity in determining access
to the advantages offered by particular nation-states is amply revealed by
the fact that those same European states that have been relaxing border
controls internally remain preoccupied with excluding non-nationals of
the member-states.

Moreover, even if they no longer need passports to traverse intra-
Community frontiers, nationals of the European Union's member states
still require documentation (typically the national ID card) to demon-
strate their nationality, precisely because nationality is an ascribed status
that cannot be established without reference to documents. Because the mem-
ber countries of the Community are eager to deny access to their
territories to non-nationals of its member states, the necessity of being
able to establish one's nationality remains in force. Indeed, the persis-
tendy disqualifying, rights-limiting character of a passport as a marker of
nationality has led to the growing phenomenon today of people destroy-
ing their documents in a desperate attempt to gain access, via the asylum
process, to countries that have otherwise closed off access to people of
their nationality. 96

If anything, the documentary controls and other bureaucratic
defenses that states have erected against unwanted migration are con-
stantly being strengthened and rationalized. In this respect, the activities
of the International Civil Aviation Organization - an agency formed in
1944 to facilitate air travel and that now includes some 182 member-
countries - are of considerable importance. Country representatives to
the ICAO meet regularly to try to standardize travel documents and
upgrade them technologically. The organization has been particularly
eager to encourage its member states to adopt machine-readable pass-
ports and visas, which contribute to "speeding up clearance operations,
increasing security and providing additional safeguards against alter-
ation or counterfeiting of identity information." By 1991, some 35
million of these ICAO-designed documents were in circulation among a

155

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

number of states, "and their use is spreading rapidly." 97 There is litde
evidence that states are prepared to abandon documentary require-
ments of some kind, precisely because such restrictions can be used
flexibly to regulate movement in response to fluctuating political and
economic exigencies.

The existence of migration controls profoundly influences the likeli-
hood, and thus the actual incidence, of migratory movements, though
this broad structural feature of the international system tends to disap-
pear in discussions of immigration control focused on short-term
analyses of immigration flows. In a rejoinder to those who have argued
that states are losing control of immigration, Brubaker has written:

In global perspective, the very institution of citizenship, tying particular per-
sons to particular states by virtue of the morally arbitrary accidents of birth,
serves as a powerful instrument of social closure and a profoundly illiberal
determinant of life chances. True, states are open at the margins to citizens
of other states - but only at the margins. Seen from the outside, the pros-
perous and peaceful states of the world remain powerfully exclusionary. 98

The monopolization by states of the legitimate means of movement has
hardly disintegrated, and there seems little doubt that migratory move-
ments would grow dramatically if it were to do so."

While it may be true that advancing international human rights
norms increasingly commit countries to granting the same civil and
social (though not political) rights to those merely resident in their ter-
ritories as those accorded their full citizens, 100 this development does
not necessarily signal the "decline of citizenship" 101 for most people.
These arguments primarily concern the access to rights only of immi-
grants, not of the main stock of the populations that constitute and
replenish the bodies of citizens that constitute states. Such arguments
therefore tend to overstate the significance of what are, in fact, relatively
marginal phenomena. From this point of view, it seems quite exagger-
ated to claim that, "in terms of its translation into rights and privileges,
[national citizenship] is no longer a significant construction." 102

Even if this were true, it would not necessarily be a desirable develop-
ment. For all the evil that nationalism has caused in the world, the
original promise of the nation-state - that is, before what Arendt called
the "conquest of the state by the nation" 105 - was to give birth to a broad
community of at least putative legal, political, and eventually even social
equality. 104 The contemporary erosion of "Fordist" welfare regimes at
the same time that states are said to be "losing control" of their borders
suggests that the deterioration of reasonably well-bounded "communi-
ties of character" may go hand in hand with a decline in the sense of
"mutual aid."

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FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

Michael Walzer has noted that "to tear down the walls of the state is
not ... to create a world without walls, but rather to create a thousand
petty fortresses." 105 One might argue that this is precisely what we
observe today with the spread of gated communities - "fortified
enclaves" that recall the walled cities of post-Carolingian Europe - across
the United States, in Latin America, and elsewhere. 106 The state monop-
olization of the legitimate means of movement may be giving way to the
return of the private regulation of movement, rooted in the ownership
of property within well-fortified and privately policed enclaves. This
appears to be the drift of developments; there are now estimated to be
some 20 000 gated communities in the United States, up from a near-
zero figure only thirty-five years ago. 107 If it is, passports - a product of
the political rather than the economic determination of community
membership - may give way to money as the relevant form of "identifi-
cation" that permits access to specified territories. Should this scenario
come to pass, we would indeed be witnessing the advent of "post-
national membership."

157

CONCLUSION:

A TYPOLOGY OF "PAPERS"

I have tried to demonstrate in the preceding pages that identification
documents such as passports have played a crucial role in modern states'
efforts to generate and sustain their "embrace" of individuals and to use
this embrace to expropriate the legitimate "means of movement." We
have witnessed over the last two centuries a shift in the "reach" of docu-
mentary controls on movement from relatively small-scale spaces
(municipalities) in dynastic states to "national" spaces and, more recently,
to the "suprastate" level of the European Union. The documents involved
have been critical to state-building activities in that they identify who is
"in" and who is "out" in membership terms, and thus help distinguish who
may make legitimate claims to the rights and benefits of membership.
Here I explicate in greater detail the nature of the different types of such
documents and analyze their relationship to states' assertion of a
monopoly on the right to regulate people's movements.

Such documents come in three basic varieties. Clearly, (external)
passports and internal passports or "passes" are not the same thing,
although the former appears to have evolved out of the latter to a signif-
icant degree. External or international passports, most familiar today to
those from "liberal-democratic" countries, are documents associated
with movement across international state boundaries. They ordinarily
constitute prima facie evidence of the bearer's nationality. In contrast,
internal passports or passes are designed to regulate movements within
the jurisdiction of a state. The identification card, common to societies
on the European continent and to those that have endured colonial
domination by Europeans, constitutes a "mixed" type, lying between the
other two in terms of its role in control over movement and in securing
citizen access to privileges and benefits.

158

CONCLUSION

The legal implications of the differences between "internal" and
"external" passports are far-reaching. The right to leaveand return to one's
country is a prerogative that has come to be widely accepted in interna-
tional human rights law, even if that law is often ignored in practice. The
very enunciation of such "rights," it should be noted, indicates the extent
to which states and the state system have expropriated and monopolized
the legitimate means of movement in our time. In contrast to the widely
recognized right to leave and return, the right to move within one's coun-
try is a matter of the domestic law of sovereign states, subject only to the
relatively weak and largely unenforceable strictures that may be imposed
by human rights norms and conventions. Despite the emergence of a
greater propensity to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of states
in recent years, it remains true that "once a population is incorporated
into complete citizenship, a nation-state is given almost complete author-
ity to subordinate the population: It can expropriate, kill, and starve, with
relatively little fear of external intervention."' Needless to say, this author-
ity extends to nation-states' control over the movements of persons
within their borders as well.

Most familiar to and accepted by people today is the right of states to
control entry, a prerogative that has come to be understood as one of the
quintessential features of sovereignty. It is important to note, however,
that the widespread recognition of this prerogative is a fairly recent devel-
opment. Recall that in his survey of the international legal opinion
prevailing during the period immediately preceding the First World War,
a German analyst of the international passport system, Werner
Bertelsmann, was unable to muster any consensus for the view that states
had an unequivocal right to bar foreigners from entry into their territory. 2

Still, although they have come to be governed by different bodies of
law, passports and passes share the function of regulating the move-
ments of people within and across delimited spaces, thereby affirming
states' control over bounded territories and enhancing their embrace of
populations. Identification cards, by contrast, are not normally, or at
least not primarily, used to regulate movement, but simply to establish
the identity of the bearer for purposes of state administration and of
gaining access to benefits distributed by the state. Let us examine each
of these documents in turn.

INTERNATIONAL PASSPORTS

The contemporary international passport is primarily an expression of
the attempt by modern nation-states to assert their exclusive monopoly
over the legal means of movement. But the passport cannot be reduced
exclusively to a mechanism of state control, even if this is certainly its

159

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

principal function today. For in addition to enhancing bureaucratic
domination over persons and territories, the passport vouchsafes the
issuing state's guarantee of aid and succor to its bearer while in the juris-
diction of other states. Possession of a passport thus constitutes ipso facto
evidence of a legitimate claim on the resources and services of the
embassies or consulates of the issuing state - not to mention, in extreme
cases, on its military power.

For the traveler, the modern passport also functions as a laissez passer,
bearing witness to the document's partial origins in diplomatic practice.
Passports issued by the United States, for example, carry the following
inscription:

The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all
whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States
named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to
give all lawful aid and protection.

Individual travelers have thus been transformed into quasi-diplomatic
representatives of particular countries, simply because the issuing state
has usurped the capacity to authorize movement and thus "embraced"
the traveler as a citizen-member of the nation-state.

These ambiguities of passports indicate that these documents cannot
be regarded merely as a means of governmental control. To use again
the words of the United States passport, the "passport is a valuable citi-
zenship and identity document. It should be carefully safeguarded. Its
loss could cause [the bearer] unnecessary travel complications . . ."
Modern passports, like their predecessors such as safe-conducts and lais-
sez passers, facilitate movement into and out of spaces controlled by
others than one's own sovereign. The ambiguous significance of the
passport is suggested nicely by the fact that, in the United States, pass-
ports are issued by the Department of State (our "Foreign Ministry"),
while passports are inspected upon entry by the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, a branch of the Justice Department.

Despite these ambiguities, state control over individual movement
is clearly the predominant purpose of passports today. The functions
performed by the passport in contemporary interstate travel may be
described as follows.

Departure

Routine travel across international borders involves a three-part process.
First, the individual must depart his or her state of origin. Permission to
leave one's country is by no means a foregone conclusion for people
from many lands, despite the widespread recognition of such a right in
international law. 3 Subjects of a state cannot automatically assume that

160

CONCLUSION

they have the right to travel abroad, a situation both manifested and
exacerbated by the fact that most states now require passports for depar-
ture from their domains. Because passports are also normally required
for entry into other countries, the right to a passport from one's own
government is virtually synonymous with the right to travel abroad. For
example, a 1967 decision by the Supreme Court of India holding that
Indian citizens have a constitutional right to travel abroad also held that,
in consequence, the government had no prerogative to withhold a pass-
port from any citizen who requested one, for such withholding would
have nullified the basic right. 4 Consistent with this sort of ruling, most
citizens of democratic states, at least, have come to assume that they will
be able to acquire a passport on demand.

These considerations point to the usual connection between access to
a passport and national citizenship. A recent German study of passport
law put the matter as follows:

Each state may issue passports only to those who stand in a close factual
relationship to it. As a rule, therefore, passports are issued primarily to citi-
zens of the state in question. Only in exceptional cases are travel documents
issued to foreigners who happen to be within the state's territory. 5

This presumed connection between citizenship and possession of a
state's passport is, of course, the basis for the colloquial reference to the
latter as an indication of possession of the former.

Formal citizenship is not necessarily the foundation of a claim to a
passport for travel, however. As indicated by the inscription in the United
States passport quoted above, states may elect to offer passports for inter-
state travel to their non-citizen nationals (e.g., "denizens" such as resident
aliens, refugees, asylees, or non-citizen populations over which states hold
dominion). In principle, states may elect to give passports to anyone they
choose, restricted only by the terms of international law and agreements
and by their own legal determinations concerning to whom they want to
extend their protections while those persons are abroad. According to a
leading expert on international migration law, in fact:

[S]tate practice in the issuance of passports is so varied . . . that it is impos-
sible to establish a connection in international law between the issuance of
a passport and the acquisition or tenure of nationality. The problem is not
merely that very many states issue travel documents of various kinds to
travelers of foreign nationality but that some [s]tates issue passports, in
the strict sense of the term, to aliens of defined classes. 6

The widespread deviations from the standard assumption of a connec-
tion between citizenship and access to a passport invalidate this
assumption, even though the principal function of a passport in inter-
national law is to demonstrate the identity and nationality of the bearer.

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THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

Because states and the state system have monopolized the power to
regulate international movement, persons must possess a passport
regardless of its origins of issuance; this situation creates anomalies for
those who have difficulty in claiming affiliation with a particular state.

Conversely, states may choose not to grant passports to particular per-
sons, irrespective of their legal status (citizens, denizens, etc.). States
that curtail free departure and return generally deny their subjects
many of the other rights we associate with modern citizenship and
human rights norms. In 1982, for example, the apartheid-era South
African courts ruled that access to a passport was a privilege rather than
a right for both blacks and whites, and that the government could
revoke any passport without cause or appeal. 7 Yet even nominally demo-
cratic states have been known to refuse to grant documents for
international travel to certain groups of their citizens. As noted earlier,
for example, the State Department gained the authority under the
terms of the Internal Security Act of 1950 to deny passports for interna-
tional travel to members of the Communist Party. 8 These examples
indicate states' interest in monopolizing the authority to grant legal
passage for political or ideological reasons.

Beyond the passport itself, a number of countries insist that the inter-
national voyager acquire an exit visa as evidence of the state's
acquiescence in the traveler's (emigrant's?) departure. Rulers' fears of
"brain drain" often underlie such restrictions. As a result, less developed
countries in particular have frequently argued that they must retain con-
trol over the departure of their subjects in order to be able to take
advantage of the expenditures on education and training from which
those subjects have benefited. 9 Restrictive exit policies are frequently to
be found, as Zolberg has noted, in countries that impose extraordinary
tasks on their populations in either political or economic terms: "it is
nearly impossible to secure compliance with drastic state demands if
people are able to vote with their feet." 10 Exit visa requirements make
this form of voting more difficult.

Freedom of movement and citizenship rights may thus diverge in
significant and unexpected ways. Modern states have frequently denied
their citizens the right freely to travel abroad, and the capacity of states
to deny untrammeled travel is effected by those states' control over the
distribution of passports and related documents, which have become
essential prerequisites for admission into many countries.

Entry

Having successfully departed the country of origin, the traveler must
gain access to a destination country. In an international state system that
still regards sovereignty as its most fundamental principle, no traveler

162

CONCLUSION

can presume that receiving states will grant access to their soil. 11 At a
time when substantial but unknown numbers of people become "immi-
grants" simply by overstaying the legally prescribed duration of their
stay, limiting ingress into the territory is the best way for states to avoid
entering into a series of potentially costly obligations to non-nationals. 12
Passport and visa controls are crucial mechanisms for this purpose, the
"first line of defense" against the entry of undesirables. Indeed, the
fundamental purpose of passports from the point of view of interna-
tional law is to provide to the admitting state a prima facie guarantee that
another state is prepared to accept an alien that the destination state
may choose not to admit or to expel. 13

For the entry portion of the process of international travel, an entry
visa may be required in addition to the passport. In such cases, the pass-
port plays primarily the role of a certificate of identification, assuring
the receiving government that would-be entrants are who they say they
are. If required, the visa is the document of record authorizing entry.
Passports have come to be more or less universally required for admis-
sion to a foreign territory, but they may not suffice in themselves for
gaining such admission. In other words, they may be necessary but not
sufficient conditions for legally crossing international borders.

Just as possession of citizenship in certain countries may present
barriers to international movement, the lack of a nationality - the condi-
tion of statelessness - may also pose severe problems for anyone wishing
to navigate the international state system and its strictures on individual
movement. In a world in which the legitimacy of the nation-state
remains quite strong, the lack of a nationality may indeed be a calamity,
and has led the United Nations to adopt conventions intended to
reduce the prevalence of statelessness. Dowty dourly concludes, how-
ever, that "these efforts have not stirred a broad response." 14 The loss by
the stateless of a community to guarantee their rights has had particu-
larly profound ramifications for their ability to gain entry into states
typically defined since the early twentieth century in ethnonational
terms and requiring documents to regulate who may enter.

Return

Finally, the traveler wishing to return to his or her country of origin will
need a passport as unambiguous evidence of eligibility for readmission. As
a matter of international law, states are required to admit their own citi-
zens (and only them). This requirement has relatively litde to do with the
rights of persons as such, however. Rather, the doctrine of "restricted
returnability" entails that states must admit their own citizens to avoid a
situation in which the state whose national a person is might frustrate the
legitimate efforts of another state to expel unwanted aliens. From the

163

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

point of view of the individual, the ever more widely recognized right to
return to one's own country flows not from rights inhering in the individ-
ual, but rather from the exigencies of sovereignty in the international
state system. Just as the passport constitutes prima facie evidence that the
issuing country will take in the bearer if he or she is denied entry into or
expelled from the destination country, the document constitutes prima
facie evidence of a claim to return to the issuing country.

In the end, therefore, passports are necessary and sufficient not for
gaining entry to another country but only for returning to one's country
of origin. Assuming that the document is deemed to be genuine, the
passport indicates that the bearer has an incontestable right to enter the
territory controlled by its issuing state. This unexpected fact explains
the panic that grips international travelers abroad when they discover
that they have lost their passport in some distant land. Beyond the fact
that the lack of a passport is likely to complicate travel to any third coun-
tries, the ill-fated tourist fears especially that return to his or her place of
origin may be difficult or even impossible in the absence of a passport. A
lifeline has been cut, and the traveler is adrift in a world in which states
have monopolized the authority to grant passage.

The external or international passport thus proves to be a document
of considerable ambiguity. As the documentary expression of modern
states' efforts to monopolize the means of legitimate movement, the
passport concentrates in itself the enormous increase in modern states'
control over individual existence that has evolved since the nineteenth
century. At the same time, bearers of these documents are ensured that
they may avail themselves of the protections that states may provide in
an uncertain and potentially hostile world. Modern international pass-
ports thus join together diplomatic functions with mechanisms of state
control. Their spread and more vigorous enforcement during and after
the First World War - as nationalist fervor reached its height, opportuni-
ties for mass travel expanded, and nation-states consolidated their
control over territories and populations - indicate that the control func-
tion predominates. Still, if passports were intended purely for purposes
of state control, they would hardly command such a high price on many
of the world's black markets. 15 In contrast, states' control over move-
ment is the more or less exclusive function of internal passports.

INTERNAL PASSPORTS

The internal passport or "pass" has few similarities to the international
passport, with its connotations of access to foreign territories and to the
protections of the issuing state while in those other jurisdictions.
Internal passports lack the ambiguity characteristic of the latter as

164

CONCLUSION

documents that both enhance state control and afford their bearers
various rights and immunities. Instead, the internal passport may be a
state's principal means for discriminating among its subjects in terms of
rights and privileges. In particular, passes may be used to regulate the
movements of certain groups of subjects, to restrict their entry into
certain areas, and to deny them the freedom to depart their places of
residence (or of authorized presence, as in the South African mines and
urban areas during the apartheid period). In the Soviet Union, internal
passports in combination with the propiska system of housing registration
restricted the movement and domicile of Soviet subjects, especially
inhibiting their freedom to take up residence in certain urban areas and
constraining the departure of collective farmers from the countryside. 16
As modern states have expanded their administrative capacity to
embrace the populations resident in their jurisdictions, controls on inter-
nal movement (and on residence) have sometimes been strengthened as
well. Nowadays, the use of internal passports to control movement within
state boundaries bespeaks illegitimate, authoritarian governments lording
it over subdued or terrorized populations. Internal passports and passes
constitute a reversion to practices generally abandoned by democratic
nation-states by the twentieth century. Such states have generally dropped
requirements that internal movement be specifically authorized in favor
of a requirement that all persons be in a position to identify themselves to
the authorities when the latter demand that they do so. The identity card
has thus assumed much greater importance in such countries than inter-
nal travel documents perse.

IDENTITY CARDS

Identity cards confront us with a documentary "gray zone." They, rather
than internal passports authorizing movement per se, may be used by the
authorities to enforce intermittent checks on movement. Those
required to have such documents (often after the age of sixteen) must
produce them on the demand of the organs of social order, and failure
to do so is likely to be a punishable offense. Even in democratic states,
such identity checks may be used to control access to certain areas,
although the degree to which such regulation is admissible may be sub-
ject to legal dispute. Yet such identity documents may also be necessary
for gaining access to certain rights of democratic participation (e.g.,
voting), public services (e.g., medical care), and transfer payments
("welfare") . Internal identification documents that may be used by states
to control movement therefore frequendy share some of the features of
international passports, enabling their bearers to obtain access to the
benefits associated with citizenship in a particular state.

165

THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT

Modern democratic states typically require some kind of identification
card that is used to regulate movement only sporadically, but that may
be crucial for acquiring certain benefits of membership (e.g., the
Personalausweis in Germany; the carte d'identite in France; the driver's
license or social security card in the United States, although technically
speaking these are not "ID cards"). In contrast, authoritarian states often
impose pass controls on movement for significant elements of the popula-
tion and enforce those controls more regularly and stringently; the
connection of such documents to the provision of social services or the
acquisition of the benefits of citizenship is dwarfed by their use for pur-
poses of social control. It would perhaps be most useful to think of internal
identity documents as reflecting, together with external and internal pass-
ports, points on a continuum defined by the efforts of modern states to
grasp their populations and monopolize control over legitimate move-
ment. What all of these documents share in common, however, is the use
of pieces of paper to construct and sustain enduring identities for admin-
istrative purposes - that is, to enhance states' embrace of individuals.

Ultimately, passports and identity documents reveal a massive
illiberality, a presumption of their bearers' guilt when called upon to
identify themselves. The use of such documents by states indicates their
fundamental suspicion that people will lie when asked who or what they
are, and that some independent means of confirming these matters
must be available if states are to sustain themselves as going concerns. In
the face of potentially unstable and possibly counterfeit identities, states
impose durable identities in order to achieve their administrative, eco-
nomic, and political aims. Passports and other documents authorizing
movement and establishing identity discourage people from choosing
identities inconsistent with those validated by the state.

Documents such as passports and ID cards constitute the "proof of our
identities for administrative purposes, and permit states to establish an
enduring embrace of those admitted into their communities and to
distinguish them from others. Our everyday acceptance of "the passport
nuisance" 17 and of the frequent demands from state officials that we
produce "ID" is a sign of the success with which states have monopolized
the capacity to regulate movement and thus to constrain the freedom of
ordinary people to come and go, as well as to identify and constrain
possible interlopers. The state monopolization of the means of legiti-
mate movement has thus rendered individual travelers dependent on
state (as opposed to private) regulation of their movements in a manner
previously unparalleled in human history. In this regard, people have to
some extent become prisoners of their identities, which may sharply
limit their opportunities to come and go across jurisdictional spaces.

166

CONCLUSION

Passports and identification documents, the products of elaborate
bureaucracies devoted to identifying persons and regulating their
mobility, have made possible this extraordinary transformation of social
life - a transformation akin to those identified by Marx when he ana-
lyzed the monopolization of the means of production by capitalists, and
by Weber when he discussed the modern state's expropriation of the
legitimate use of violence. To these two, we must add a third type of
"expropriation" in order to make sense of the modern world - the
monopolization of the legitimate means of movement by modern states
and the state system more broadly. While hardly seamless, the monopo-
lization of the legitimate means of movement by states and the
international state system as a whole in the modern world has been
extremely successful in regulating population movements and sorting
out who belongs where. It has thus been critical to states' efforts to con-
struct putatively homogeneous "nations," although this is an aim that in
the very nature of the case is impossible to achieve.

167

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 See "Law to Track Foreigners Entering US Postponed," New York Times
(West Coast edition), 4 October 1998: A4; "Agreement Resolved Many
Differences Over Policy as Well as Money," New York Times (West Coast
edition), 16 October 1998: A17.

2 See Brubaker 1992, Chapter 1; Crowley 1998.

3 See especially Wiener 1998.

4 See Soysal 1994.

5 I have myself been involved in organizing an effort toward this end, although
the temporal frame and geographic reach ultimately remained more
restricted than we would have wished; see Caplan & Torpey 2000.

6 My thinking on this issue has been much influenced by Bull 1995.

1 COMING AND GOING

1 Meyer 1987: 53.

2 See Foucault 1979; 1980b; 1991.

3 See, e.g., Zolberg 1978; 1983. It seems to me that Zolberg's pleas have only
recently begun to be heeded; see, e.g., Skran 1995.

4 See Anderson 1991. Michael Mann (1993: 218) has noted that "Anderson's
'print capitalism' could as easily generate a transnational West as a commu-
nity of nations" in the absence of the institutionalization of the latter.

5 On the "identification revolution," see Noiriel 1991; he develops the notion
of "The Card and the Code" (1996, Chapter 2). In her work on laws
relating to naming, Jane Caplan (2000) speaks of the emergence of a
"culture of identification" during the nineteenth century.

6 For a comparative analysis of slavery and serfdom as systems of control over
movement, see Kolchin 1987, especially Chapter 1, "Labor Management."

7 For an in-depth study of such persons in one country, see Beier 1985.

8 Polanyi 1944: 104 (my emphasis); see also Chambliss 1964.

168

NOTES (PAGES 9-16)

9 For an analysis of the origins of modern poor relief systems, see Gorski
1996, 1997. On the "nationalization" of poor relief in Germany, see
Steinmetz 1993. One may well wonder whether recent changes in US
welfare law that shift responsibility from the federal down to the state level
have begun to reverse this trend.

10 On such organizations, see Spruyt 1994.

1 1 On passport controls in the Soviet Union and China, see Torpey 1997.

12 On this issue, see Gilboy 1997.

13 See, for instance, Mann 1993; Skocpol 1978; Tilly 1990. Randall Collins
used the term "penetration" as a sort of taken-for-granted shorthand for
understanding the essential activities of modern states in his comments on
a presentation by Michael Mann at the Center for Social Theory and
Comparative History, UCLA, 27 January 1997.

14 See Habermas 1987.

15 Mann 1993: 60.

16 Ibid. 61.

17 See Scott 1998. If I may borrow the metaphor with which Scott describes
how he and Stephen Marglin arrived at roughly similar views about the
functioning of states, he and I seem to have taken different trains to much
the same destination; his train, however, was a "local," whereas mine was an
"express." That is, Scott explores a variety of ways in which modern states
have sought to make societies "legible," while I have tried to focus on one
particular aspect of that effort - namely, identification documents
deployed for the regulation of movement.

18 Douglas 1966; 121.

19 Brubaker 1996: 24; see also Powell & Dimaggio 1991.

20 Noiriel 1996: 45.

21 See Brubaker 1992.

22 Weber 1978: 922.

23 Brubaker 1996: 16, 19.

24 Tilly 1990: 25.

25 Giddens 1987: 47. Leonard Dudley (1991) has noted that writing origi-
nated (in ancient Sumeria) not as a means of recording speech, but in
order to facilitate taxation.

26 See Goffman 1963.

27 See ibid. 1961.

28 See Foucault 1979; 1980a. For a critique of the negative assessment of the
visual faculty in recent French social thought and its attendant attack on
Enlightenment styles of thought with their emphasis on transparency, lumi-
nosity, and, well, enlightenment, see Jay 1993.

29 1996 California Driver Handbook, Department of Motor Vehicles, State of
California [n.p., n.d.]. My italics.

30 For a discussion of recent developments in the understanding of surveil-
lance in modern societies, see Lyon 1994. Lyon's exposition makes clear
that it is not only states that have an interest in intensified surveillance, but
private economic entities as well; this book concerns only the way that

169

NOTES (PAGES 16-24)

states make use of and depend upon surveillance techniques in order to
control movement.

31 Foucault 1979: 189.

32 Nordman 1996: 1123-4.

33 Anderson 1974: 37-8.

34 Bertelsmann 1914: 17-18.

35 Raeff 1983: 74, 89-90.

36 5 R. II, stat. 1, c. 2 (1381) section 7, cited in Plender 1988: 85 n. 12.

37 See Warneke 1996.

38 14 Charles II c. 12. This law appears to be what Karl Polanyi refers to as the
"Act of Settlement (and Removal)."

39 Bendix 1978: 50 Iff.

40 Matthews 1993: 1-2.

41 See Kolchin 1987.

42 On this process, see Burke 1997; Elias 1978; 1982; Tilly 1990.

43 See Brubaker 1992: 37. It is suggestive that, at least according to one histo-
rian, the term "passport" was first attested to in France during this period.
See Nordman 1987: 148.

44 Polanyi 1944: 63-7. 1 am grateful to Peggy Somers for reminding me of the
usefulness of Polanyi's classic for the analysis I am trying to develop here.

2 "ARGUS OF THE PATRIET

1 See Woloch 1994: 130, 393; see also Woloch 1986.

2 See Burguiere & Revel 1989: 66; Grossi 1905: 145; Nordman 1996: 1123.

3 Cobb 1970: 243.

4 Hufton 1974: 229.

5 Cahiers des Etats Generaux (Paris: Librairie Administrative de Paul Dupont,
1868) [hereinafter Cahiers], vol. 4: 759. See also the cahiers of the bourg
d'Ecouen, Paris hors les murs, Cahiers, vol. 4: 509.

6 Cahiers, vol. 4: 21.

7 Lefebvre 1962: 107.

8 On the Tennis Court Oath, see Lefebvre 1947: 84-5.

9 Le Moniteur, vol. 2: 22-3.

10 Greer 1951: 26.

11 Lefebvre 1962: 180-1.

12 Collection complete des lois, decrets, ordonnances, reglements, etc., ed. J. B.
Duvergier [hereinafter Collection complete], vol. 1 (Paris: A. Guyot, 1834):
195-6.

13 Le Moniteur, vol. 5, (Jeudi, 29juillet 1790): 242-3. It seems likely that this was
the same Peuchet who edited and wrote the introduction for the section on
police- the theory and practice of public administration - in the Encyclopedie
methodique in 1789. Keith Baker describes Peuchet as a man "passionate in
his defense of the values of modern society." See Baker 1990: 240 and passim
I am grateful to Jan Goldstein for pointing out this connection.

170

NOTES (PAGES 25-29)

14 LeMoniteur, vol. 5: 351-2.

15 Greer 1951: 24.

16 Lefebvre 1962: 170.

17 See the "Decret qui ordonne d'arreter toutes personnes quelconques
sortant du royaume, et d'empecher toute sortie d'effets, armes, munitions,
ou especes d'or et d'argent, etc." of 21 June 1791 in Collection complete, vol.
3: 53. Indications of the National Assembly's stunned reaction to the
announcement of the King's flight can be found in Archives parlamentaires de
1787 a 1860 [hereafter AP], 1. Serie, vol. 27 (Paris: Societe d'imprimerie et
librairie administratives Paul Dupont, 1887): 358.

18 This paragraph and the next are based on the account in Le Moniteur, vol.
8: 741-3.

19 Lefebvre 1962: 207-8.

20 LeMoniteur, vol. 8: 737.

21 Ibid. 738.

22 Ibid.

23 "Decret qui indique les formalites a observer pour sortir du royaume" of
28 June 1791, in Collection complete, vol. 3: 68-9.

24 See AP, 1. Serie, vol. 27: 563-4.

25 Greer 1951: 26; see "Decret du ler-6 aout 1791, relatif aux emigrants," AP,
1. Serie, vol. 29: 8-89; and "Decret portant abolition de toutes procedures
instruites sur les faits relatifs a la revolution, amnestie generale en faveur
des hommes de guerre, et revocation du decret du ler aout dernier, relatif
aux emigrans, 14-15 septembre 1791," Collection complete, vol. 3: 267-8.

26 See, for example, Lefebvre 1962: 187-8, 191-2.

27 Quoted in ibid. 105.

28 Quoted in Brubaker 1992: 47.

29 For a discussion of this process, see Guiraudon 1991; Wahnich 1997; n.d.

30 Noiriel 1996: 46.

31 On the "departmentalization" of France, see Woloch 1994: 26-31. The quo-
tation is on p. 27.

32 For a brief discussion of the consequences of the measures taken in this
regard until mid-1791, see AP, 1. Serie, vol. 28: 722; this discussion was the
prelude to the "Decret pour l'execution du tarif des droits d'entree et de
sortie dans les relations du royaume avec l'etranger, 6 aout (28 juillet et) -
22 aout 1791," Collection complete, vol. 3: 182-202.

33 Lefebvre 1964: 295.

34 Constitution francaise, Collection complete, vol. 3: 241.

35 One hundred and seventy-five years later, in striking down as unconstitu-
tional the denial of passports to suspected Communists wishing to travel
abroad, the American Supreme Court would find that "freedom of travel is
a constitutional liberty closely related to rights of free speech and associa-
tion." The principal rulings were handed down in Kent v. Dulles (1958) and
in Apthekerv. Secretary of State (1964). See Plender 1988: 103; Turack 1972: 11.

36 AP, 1. Serie, vol. 30:621.

37 Ibid. 632.

171

NOTES (PAGES 30-41)

38 Greer 1951: 26-7.

39 "Decret relatif aux emigrans," Collection complete, vol. 4: 14-15.

40 See Lefebvre 1962: 213-15.

41 "Arrete pris par le directoire du departement du Nord, le 17 decembre
• 1791," quoted in Wahnich 1997: 96.

42 See AP, 1. Serie, vol. 37: 608-9.

43 Wahnich 1997: 96-7.

44 AP, 1. Serie, vol. 36: 618; quoted in Wahnich 1997: 107-8.

45 Quoted in Lefebvre 1962: 217.

46 "Arrete relatif aux certificats de residence (Extrait du registre des delibera-
tions du corps municipal, du lundi, 9janvier 1792)," Le Moniteur, vol. 11:
114.

47 Le Moniteur, vol. 10: 622.

48 AP, 1. Serie, vol. 37: 149.

49 Ibid. vol. 38: 14-27.

50 See Polanyi 1944: 106, 140. Georges Lefebvre has written (1962: 185) that
"Bentham drew up a plan forjudicial reform, which Mirabeau presented to
the Constituent Assembly." Bernard Gainot of the Institut de l'Histoire de
la Revolution francaise doubts this, however (personal communication, 20
September 1997). The Panopticon is of course the institution for surveil-
lance and correction about which Foucault would later make so much in
Discipline and Punish.

51 See the short biography in Caratini 1988: 379.

52 Lefebvre 1962: 213.

53 The previous two paragraphs are based on AP, 1. Serie, vol. 37: 608-9.

54 The discussion of the proposed passport law on which the following
account is based can be found in AP, 1. Serie, vol. 37: 691-4.

55 See "Decret relatif a l'organisation d'une police municipale et correc-
tionelle, 19-22 juillet 1791," Collection complete, vol. 3: 1 14ff.

56 AP, 1. Serie, vol. 37: 691-4.

57 AP, 1. Serie, vol. 38: 38-45.

58 AP, 1. Serie, vol. 37: 691-4. My italics.

59 See Soboul 1989: 1089.

60 The following account is based on AP, 1. Serie, vol. 38: 14-27.

61 Noiriel 1996: xvii-xviii.

62 In an article of 22 July 1854 in La Lumiere (p. 156), one Richebourg claims
to have introduced the idea of the passport photograph. I am grateful to
Jane Caplan for this reference.

63 The protagonists mistakenly refer to this statute as the law of 19 janvier
1791.

64 See Caratini 1988: 522.

65 Lefebvre 1962: 215.

66 Fussell 1980: 28.

67 "Decret relatif aux passeports," 1 fevrier- 28 mars 1792, Collection complete,
vol. 4: 55-6.

68 This account is drawn from AP, 1. Serie, vol. 38: 14-27.

172

NOTES (PAGES 42-46)

69 "Decret relatif aux passeports," 1 fevrier - 28 mars 1792, in Collection
complete, vol. 4: 55-6.

70 "Decret relatif aux passeports," 28-29 juillet 1792, in Collection complete, vol.
4:272.

71 On this point, see Brubaker 1992: 67.

72 "Decret relatif au retablissement de la libre circulation des personnes et des
choses dans l'interieur," 8 septembre 1792, AP, 1. Serie, vol. 49: 472-3.

73 See AP, 1. Serie, vol. 50: 149; "Decret relatif a la libre circulation des
personnes et des choses dans l'interieur," 19 septembre 1792, in Collection
complete, vol. 4: 470.

74 See Nordman 1987: 149-50.

75 Noiriel 1996: xviii; see "Loi que determine le mode de constater l'etat civil
des citoyens, du 20 septembre 1792," Le Moniteur, vol. 14, pp. 173-6. Noiriel
goes on to note that, in the Napoleonic period, the government went even
further toward fixing identities for administrative purposes, imposing upon
all individuals "the obligation to use a single given surname [and] estab-
lishing rules for its use and transmission."

76 Quoted in Brubaker 1992: 8.

77 "Decret qui bannit a perpetuite les emigres francais, 23-25 octobre 1792,"
Collection complete, vol. 5: 27.

78 "Decret qui oblige les emigres rentres en France a sortir du territoire
francais, 10 novembre 1792," Collection complete, vol. 5: 42.

79 "29 novembre - ler decembre 1792, Decret qui leve la suspension des
certificats de residence en ce qui concerne les negocians, les marchands et
leurs facteurs, connus pour etre dans l'usage de voyager pour leurs affaires
de commerce," Collection complete, vol. 5: 63.

80 "7 decembre 1792, Decret relatif aux passeports a accorder a ceux qui
seraient dans le cas de sortir du territoire francais pour leurs affaires,"
Collection complete, vol. 5: 69. Interestingly, this decree was followed the same
day by a "Decret qui abolit toutes les servitudes reeles ou conditions
portees par les actes d'infeodation ou d'acensement, et qui tiennent a la
nature du regime feodal."

81 AP, 1. Serie, vol. 54:404.

82 "22-27 janvier 1793, Decret relatif a la nouvelle forme des conges des
batimens de commerce francais et des passeports a delivrer aux batimens
etrangers," Collection complete, vol. 5: 1 18.

83 See Le Moniteur, vol. 15: 498, 531-2; vol. 16: 52; Guiraudon 1991: 595;
Soboul 1989: 198.

84 AP, 1. Serie, vol. 59: 270.

85 Collection complete, vol. 5: 173-4.

86 Ibid. 175.

87 "10 avril 1793, Decrets relatifs aux passeports," Collection complete, vol. 5: 245.

88 Lefebvre 1964: 45-8. See the "Decret concernant les peines portees contre
les emigres, 28 mars - 5 avril 1793," Collection complete, vol. 5: 218-28.

89 See "Decret relatif aux passeports des agens du conseil executif et du
comite du salut public," Collection complete, vol. 5: 279.

173

NOTES (PAGES 46-51)

90 "22-26 juin 1793, Decret relatif aux citoyens servant dans les armees
dirigees contre les rebelles," Collection complete, vol. 5: 350.

91 See AP, 1. Serie, vol. 81: 626.

92 Lefebvre 1964: 68; see the "Decret relatif aux gens suspects, 17 septembre -
12 aout 1793," Collection complete, vol. 6: 172.

93 LeMoniteur, vol. 18: 333.

94 Wahnich 1997: 117.

95 Guiraudon 1991: 595. Wahnich (1997: 12, 21) claims that the armband was
merely proposed (as article 7 of the Loi sur les Strangers of 3 August 1793),
but never actually carried out.

96 Lefebvre 1964: 47; Wahnich 1997: 119-20.

97 Lefebvre 1964: 40.

98 Cobb 1970: 95.

99 Lefebvre 1964: 294.

100 See LeMoniteur, vol. 19: 134-5.

101 See he Moniteur, vol . 2 1 : 57 1 .

102 The measure to suppress the municipal administration of Paris came on 14
FructidorYear II. See Soboul 1989: 811.

103 Le Moniteur, vol. 22: 106. For more on the contention between the munici-
pality of Paris and the central government over the authority to regulate
movement, see Le Moniteur, vol. 23: 250-1.

104 "Decret interpretatif de celui du 6 fructidor, concernant les passeports,"
Collection complete, vol. 7: 287.

105 See the draconian law of 5 Ventose Year III (24 February 1795), which
relieved of their responsibilities and confined to surveillance in their origi-
nal municipality all functionaries of whatever level who had been relieved
of their posts after 10 Thermidor (28 July 1794); LeMoniteur, vol. 23: 548-9.
On the 1795 relaxation of these restrictions for cultivators, artists, and mer-
chants, see Le Moniteur, vol. 23: 693.

106 Greer 1951: 97.

107 LeMoniteur, vol. 24: 365.

108 See Lefebvre 1964: 144-5.

109 "Arrete du comite de surete general, du 17 messidor, l'an III de la
republique francaise une et indivisible [5juillet 1795]," LeMoniteur, vol. 25:
180.

110 Le Moniteur, vol. 25: 421.

111 "23 messidor an III (11 juillet 1795), Decret qui ordonne aux etrangers nes
dans les pays avec lesquels la Republique est en guerre de sortir de France,
s'ils n'y sont pas domicilies, avant le premier janvier 1792," Collection com-
plete, vol. 8: 185.

112 Collection complete, vol. 8: 301-2.

113 "24 vendemiaire an II (15 octobre 1793), Decret contenant des mesures
pour l'extinction de la mendicite," Collection complete, vol. 6: 229-33.

114 See "2 germinal an 4 (22 mars 1796) - Arrete du Directoire executif,
contenant des mesures relatives a l'execution des lois," Collection complete,
vol. 9: 66-7.

174

NOTES (PAGES 51-59)

1 15 Cobb 1970: 95-6.

1 16 Le Moniteur, vol. 27: 535.

117 The speaker referred to was Jean-Gerard Lacuee; see Biographie nouvelle des
contemporains, vol. 10: 261-2.

1 18 This account is based on Le Moniteur, vol. 27: 627-30; for the law itself, see
"14 ventose an 4 (4 mars 1796), Loi qui determine le mode de delivrance
des passeports a l'etranger," Collection complete, vol. 9: 53. Having adopted
this measure, the government almost immediately adopted another
designed to reduce the issuance of passports to those using assumed
names, and to punish those involved. See "17 ventose an IV (7 mars 1796),
Loi contenant des mesures pour empecher les delivrances des passeports
sous des noms supposes," Collection complete, vol. 9: 53-4.

119 See Souhait's remarks in the Council of 500 of 24 Ventose Year IV (14
March 1796), in Le Moniteur, vol. 27: 710.

120 "4 nivose an 5 (24 December 1796), Arrete du Directoire executif, qui
present des mesures relatives aux passeports des etrangers arrivant en
France," Collection complete, vol. 9: 250. The Bureau (Ministry) of General
Police had been created by the Committee of Public Safety at the end of
FlorealYear II (second half of May 1794). See Lefebvre 1964: 122.

121 "21 germinal an 5 (10 avril 1797), Arrete du Directoire executif,
concernant les passeports delivres par les ministres et envoyes des Etats-
Unis d'Amerique," Collection complete, vol. 9: 339.

122 Probably the best known response was Burke's mordant Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790), which reflected much elite opinion.

123 See Greer 1951: 102-3; Lefebvre 1964: 197-201.

124 Plender 1988: 65; for the run-up to the law, see Le Moniteur, vol. 29: 22, 29,
33, 39, and 43.

125 Collection complete, vol. 10: 79-80.

126 Tocqueville 1955: x.

3 SWEEPING OUT AUGEAS'S STABLE

1 On this point, see the discussion in Sheehan 1989: 232-3.

2 Ludtke 1989: 46.

3 See H. H. 1866: 222, where the author writes that "passports (Passe) them-
selves are first mentioned under the name of 'passports' (Passporten) in
article LXXXIX of the Reiterbestallung of Speyer in 1570." I am much
indebted to Mathieu Deflem for passing along this valuable article.

4 H. H. 1866: 224-5.

5 Grossi 1905: 136.

6 H. H. 1866: 225.

7 Grossi 1905: 122.

8 Hansen 1961: 50.

9 See Sheehan 1989: 296-302; the quotation is from p. 301.
10 Koch 1985: 18.

175

NOTES (PAGES 59-68)

11 "Allgemeines PaBreglement fur gesammte Koniglich-Preussische Staaten,
vom 20. Marz 1813," Gesetzsammlung fur die koniglichen preussischen Staaten
[hereinafter Gesetzsammlung] 1813: 47-57.

12 Bertelsmann 1914: 18.

13 Koch 1985: 23.

14 "Allgemeines PaBreglement fur gesammte Koniglich-Preussische Staaten,
vom 20. Marz 1813," Gesetzsammlung 1813: 47-57.

15 Sheehan 1989: 317-18; the quotation is from p. 318.

16 "Deklaration des Pass-Reglements vom 20. Marz 1813 in Ansehung
der Frachtfuhrleute, Handwerksgesellen und Viehhaendler. Vom 20.
Februar 1814," Gesetzsammlung 1814: 10-12. The edict was issued from the
King's field headquarters at Troyes, over both his name and that of
Hardenberg.

17 See Sheehan 1989: 401-6.

18 "Allgemeines PaBedikt fur die Preussische Monarchic," 22 June 1817, in
Gesetzsammlung 1817: 152ff.

19 H. H. 1866: 229-30.

20 Ludtke 1989: 82.

21 Brubaker 1992: 69-70. The push for greater freedom of movement even
extended beyond the boundaries of the Confederation itself; for an exam-
ple, see the "Erklarung wegen Ausdehnung der seit 1812 zwischen der
koniglichen Preussischen Regierung und der Schweizerischen Eidgenossen-
schaft bestehenden Freizflgigkeits-LFbereinkunft, auf sammtliche jetzige
Konigliche Preussische und zur Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft
gehorige Lande," 25 October 1817, in Gesetzsammlung 1817: 1.

22 Brubaker 1992: 69-70.

23 Walker 1964: 75.

24 Ibid. 13-20, 29-30; the quotation is from p. 30.

25 Hansen 1961: 110.

26 Walker 1964: 20, 24, 30; the quotation is from p. 20.

27 See Walker 1971.

28 Hansen 1961: 170.

29 Ibid. 155-6.

30 See Polanyi 1944: 77-8, 88-9; see also Hansen 1961: 128-9.

31 For a succinct discussion of the historiographical controversy over the
significance of the Speenhamland system of allowances, see Marshall
1985; the quotation here is from p. 43. I am grateful to Phil Gorski for this
reference.

32 MacDonagh 1961: 26. The reality of a bicontinental, "North Atlantic" Irish
society at this time - as well as many other examples that could be cited,
perhaps especially including the overseas colonies of Chinese - should be
taken into account by those who have only recently discovered the phe-
nomenon of "transnationalism," or who think it new.

33 Saggar 1992: 31.

34 First British Passenger Act (43 Geo. Ill, cap. 56); see MacDonagh 1961:
61-4.

176

NOTES (PAGES 68-77)

35 See Hobsbawm 1962: 211; MacDonagh 1961: 64-5.

36 Quoted in Hansen 1961: 104.

37 Hansen 1961: 97; MacDonagh 1961: 64-5.

38 Hansen 1961: 129-30, 242.

39 "Magna Carta, 1215," in Rothwell 1975: 320-1.

40 Hansen 1961: 131-5.

41 6 & 7 Will. IV, c. 1 1 , in Statutes Revised, vol. VII, 2 & 3 William IV to 6 & 7
William IV, A. D. 1831-1836: 975-8.

42 Saggar 1992: 27.

43 Bergmann & Korth 1985: 13-14.

44 Note that jus sanguinis as migratory mercantilism tends to presuppose that
the original population from whom citizenship may be acquired by descent
constitutes "our" people; in a later context of large-scale immigration of
suspect "others," it becomes a way of excluding them and their descendants
from full citizenship. Of course, other political considerations - especially
the national mythology concerning the matter of openness to immigrants -
plays a role in these issues as well. I am grateful to Patrick Weil for pointing
out that the jus soli principle for granting citizenship held sway under the
ancien regime, and was thus not "republican" in inspiration as Brubaker has
claimed.

45 Brubaker 1992: 69-70.

46 David Blackbourn has noted that resistance to changes in communal citi-
zenship codes in southwestern Germany was fierce and was only overcome
in the 1860s. See Blackbourn, "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie:
Reappraising German History in the Nineteenth Century," in Blackbourn
& Eley 1984: 191-2.

47 Walker 1971: 267.

48 Bergmann & Korth 1985: 14.

49 Brubaker 1992: 71.

50 Ibid. 65.

51 See Walker 1964: 95.

52 Steinmetz 1993: 113-14.

53 Ibid. 114.

54 Grossi 1905: 135-6; Tammeo 1906: 141; Walker 1964: 138, 142-3, 150-1.

55 See Hansen 1961: 288-90, 304.

56 This paragraph and the one following are based on the account in H. H.
1866: 230-2. Note the wide compass of the term "German states," which at
this point also routinely included Austria. For more on the meaning of
"national unification" in Germany, see below.

57 Staatsangehdnge, as opposed to Staatsburger, with its implication of a specific
package of rights a la T H. Marshall (1964).

58 Grossi 1905: 139-40.

59 H. H. 1866: 232-3, 238ff. See the remarks of Dr Friedenthal in
Stenographische Berichte iiber die Verhandlungen des Reichstages des Norddeutschen
Bundes, I. Legislatur-Periode, Session 1867 [hereinafter Verhandlungen], 1.
Band, Berlin, 1867: 177.

177

NOTES (PAGES 77-90)

60 H. H. 1866: 240-1. For a study of the rise of rail travel during the nine-
teenth century, see Schivelbusch 1980.

61 Hamerow 1969: 98-9.

62 Ibid. 160-1.

63 Ibid. 98.

64 Hansen 1961: 280.

65 See Hobsbawm 1975: 193-5.

66 Ludtke 1989: 77-8; see also pp. 78-9, 82, 87, and 1 10.

67 The text of the treaty is reproduced in H. H. 1866: 251-3.

68 On this point, see Ludtke 1989: 79.

69 Craig 1978: 11, 12, 18-19.

70 Steinmetz 1993: 9-10.

71 Verhandlungen, 2. Band, Anlagen, Berlin, 1867: 23.

72 Paragraph 3 of the 1865 passport law had included such a provision as well.
In their recent treatise on passport and citizenship law, however, Bergmann
and Korth (1990: 5) trace this liberal innovation to the 1867 law, presum-
ably because of the latter's subsequent adoption as the passport law of the
Empire.

73 See Tocqueville 1969, especially Volume 2.

74 On these points, see Verhandlungen, 2. Band: 24.

75 For these proposed amendments, see Aktenstucke 26, 31, 33, 35, and 39 in
Verhandlungen, 2. Band: 72-3, 85.

76 The record of the debate can be found in Verhandlungen, 1. Band: 177-89.

77 See Hobsbawm 1975: 196.

78 Aktenstiick 39, Verhandlungen, 2. Band: 85.

79 Craig 1978: 68-9.

80 "Gesetz iiber das PaBwesen," 12 October 1867, in Bundesgesetzblatt des
Norddeutschen Bundes, 1867 (Berlin, 1868): 33-5. For two brief legal com-
mentaries, see Brunialti 1915: 679; Grossi 1905: 141.

81 Verhandlungen, 1. Band: 183.

82 "Gesetz uber die Freizugigkeit," 1 November 1867, Bundesgesetzblatt des
Norddeutschen Bundes, 1867 (Berlin, 1868): 55-8.

83 Steinmetz 1993: 4.

84 Hobsbawm 1975: 36.

85 See Tocqueville's "Speech in the Chamber of Deputies, 27 January 1848,"
included as Appendix III in Tocqueville 1969, pp. 749-58. Tocqueville
(1971) quotes from the relevant portions in his Recollections. 16-19.

86 On the weakness of the socialist movement during this period, see
Hobsbawm 1975: 108-15. Still, a wave of labor unrest swept across the con-
tinent in 1868, touching Germany as well; see ibid. 112.

87 "Verordnung, betreffend die vorubergehende Einfuhrung der PaB-
Pflichtigkeit fur Berlin, 26 June 1878," Rekhsgesetzblatt 1878: 131. Although
the measure was explicitly stated to be temporary, I have not found any
order rescinding it.

88 I share George Steinmetz's assessment of the transformation of nineteenth-
century German historiography launched by David Blackbourn and Geoff

178

NOTES (PAGES 90-95)

Eley (1984) in their path-breaking book, The Pecularities of German History.
"Eley and Blackbourn have introduced a higher level of conceptual clarity
and rigor into the study of the Prussian-German state. They waste no time
complaining about the weakness of an idealized middle-class liberalism,
turning instead to the problem of understanding what German liberalism
actually did during the Empire. They reject the certitudes of economic
'bases' determining political and ideological 'superstructures' and attend
carefully to the failures as well as the successes of German governments in
cementing a broad ruling-class alliance. They have mustered considerable
evidence for the claim that the Prussian-German state was founded on a
bourgeois basis, that Bismarckism promoted capitalism even without direct
representation of the bourgeoisie, and that after 1890 the bourgeoisie was
increasingly the state's privileged political partner." Steinmetz 1993: 85.

89 For an extended discussion of this point, see Geoff Eley, "The British
Model and the German Road: Rethinking the Course of German History
Before 1914," in Blackbourn & Eley 1984; the quotations are from pp.
144-5.

90 On the points made in this and the preceding paragraph, see Hobsbawm
1975: 88; Steinmetz 1993: 5-6.

91 See Hobsbawm 1975: 35-9. The quotations are from pp. 35-6. See also
Brunialti 1915: 679.

92 Quoted in Plender 1988a: 67.

93 See Zeldin 1973: 198-9.

94 The quotation is from La grande encyclopedie (multiple volumes published
around 1900), vol. 26: 57; see also Brunialti 1915: 676; Burguiere & Revel
1989: 67; Plender 1988: 90 n. 132; Vattel 1863: 514 n. 1.

95 Bolis 1871, quoted by Senator Pierantoni in the debate over the 1901
Italian passport law, Atti Parlamentari delta Camera dei Senatori: Discussioni,
Legislatura XXIa, la Sessione 1900-1901 (Rome: Forzani e C. Tipografi del
Senato, 1901): 922.

4 TOWARD THE "CRUSTACEAN TYPE OF NATION"

1 Zolberg 1997: 315.

2 See Higham 1988: 8; Zolberg 1978: 250-1.

3 Hansen 1961: 102; Zolberg 1978: 256.

4 Salyer 1995: 4. On the bonding system, see Hansen 1961: 257; MacDonagh
1961:51.

5 Hansen 1961: 260; Salyer 1995: 4.

6 "An act regulating the diplomatic and consular systems of the United
States," 18 August 1856, Sec. 23, US Statutes at Large, vol. 11: 60-1. See also
United States, Department of State, Passport Office 1976: 9, 26, 31; Hunt
1898: 37-41; the quotation is on p. 41.

7 Bensel 1990: ix. On some of the difficulties of establishing national author-
ity in the United States prior to the Civil War, see also Lipset 1979: 34-5.

179

NOTES (PAGES 95-102)

8 See Foner 1970: 134-8. In one of those ironies of history, the assertion of
"states' rights" came to be associated with Republican anti-slavery agitation
against the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Foner notes laconically
(137-8) that the radical Republicans' enthusiasm for the traditionally pro-
slavery notion of states' rights was "quite remarkable in view of the conduct
of the radicals during Reconstruction."

9 See Moore 1966, Chapter 3. For Lincoln's views on the war, see McPherson
1991.

10 The decision was handed down in the case of Crandallv. Nevada. See Hall
1992: 877.

1 1 For an intriguing discussion from a global standpoint, see McNeill 1983.

12 See Higham 1988: 15-17.

13 See Coolidge 1969: 77, 148; Zolberg 1997: 299-301.

14 The quotation is from Coolidge 1969: 160; see also Chan 1990: 62; Zolberg
1997: 300-1.

15 On the objections of the French Foreign Ministry to anti-immigration poli-
cies in late nineteenth-century France, see Noiriel 1991: 94-5.

16 Fitzgerald 1996: 114.

17 Salyer 1995: 7. For the story of working-class opposition to the Chinese in
California and its role in the coming of the Chinese Exclusion Act, see
Saxton 1971.

18 The law covered those of Chinese "race" rather than simply the subjects of
the Emperor, despite the fact that this violated treaties with other coun-
tries, such as Canada, who objected to having to "keep" Chinese who failed
to gain admission into the United States.

19 Salyer 1991: 86, n. 14.

20 See Coolidge 1969: 169.

21 See Salyer 1991: 60-1; 1995: 17-19.

22 Coolidge 1969: 183-5; the quotation is from p. 185. See also Salyer 1995:
19-20.

23 See Chan 1990: 62; Coolidge 1969: 190-208.

24 Salyer 1995: 22-3.

25 Coolidge 1969: 233. This and the two preceding paragraphs are based on
Coolidge: 209-33.

26 Quoted in Salyer 1995: 26. For an excellent general discussion of immigra-
tion to the United States and of efforts to restrict it during this period, see
Chan 1990.

27 Salyer 1991: 61-2; 1995: 32.

28 See United States Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization
Service 1991: 6; Chan 1990: 62-4; Salyer 1995: 32; "An Act to amend sec-
tions four thousand and seventy-six, four thousand and seventy-eight, and
four thousand and seventy-five of the Revised Statutes," 14 June 1902, US
Statutes at Large, vol. 32, Part I: 386. Salyer contends that Chinese immigra-
tion fell under the general administration of immigration only with the
creation of the Bureau of Immigration in 1903, whereas Fitzgerald argues
that this took place with the Sundry Civil Act of June 6, 1900; see Fitzgerald

180

NOTES (PAGES 102-109)

1996: 126. According to Plender (1988: 139-40), the practice of issuing
American passports to Filipinos only came to an end when the odd coali-
tion of anti-Filipino exclusionists and the islands' independence activists
obtained the Philippines' departure from American overlordship in 1936.

29 See Fitzgerald 1996: 116, 120-3. See also United States Department of
Justice, Immigration & Naturalization Service 1991: 5-6. On the overseas
medical examination of would-be emigrants that was prompted by
American immigration rules, see the report of the Dillingham Commission
in US Congress, Senate, Committee on Immigration 191 lb: 7lff.

30 Cf. Brubaker 1992: 69-70.

31 On this point, see Clark 1984: 33.

32 See the law no. 23 on emigration and the Royal Decree no. 36 on passports,
both of 31 January 1901 , in Raccolia Ufficiale delle Leggi e dei Decreti del Regno
d'ltalia, 1901, vol. 1 (Roma: Stamperia Reale, 1901) [hereinafter Raccolta
Ufficiale]: 50-78 and 218-39. For a discussion of the emigration law's vari-
ous provisions, see Foerster 1919: 477-86.

33 Remarks of Eugenio Valli in Atti del Parlamento Italiano, Camera dei
Deputati, Sessione 1900, 1. della XXI Legislatura, vol. 1 (Roma: Tipografia
della Camera dei Deputati, 1900): 604. For an extremely critical contempo-
rary Italian view of American immigration restrictions and of the support
for them from the American labor movement, see Tammeo 1906: 106.

34 See Pantano's remarks during the debate of 30 November 1900, in Atti del
Parlamento Italiano, Camera dei Deputati, Sessione 1900, 1. della XXI
Legislatura, vol. 1: 770.

35 On efforts to restrict the immigration of foreign radicals during this
period, see Preston 1963.

36 For the attitudes of Italian elites toward emigration during this period, see
Foerster 1919: 475-6; on the decline in left-wing voting in areas of high
emigration, see Dowty 1987: 50-1, citing MacDonald 1963-64.

37 The quotation, which is of the Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini, is in
Foerster 1919: 495. On the Libyan war, see Clark 1984: 153-6.

38 On the failures of Italian imperialist designs, their consequences for the
emigration, and the 1912 citizenship law, see Foerster 1919: 486-501.

39 On the distinction between "national" and "nationalist," see Mann 1993:
32-3 and passim.

40 See Brubaker 1992: 85-6 and passim; Noiriel 1996: 55.

41 Noiriel 1991: 89.

42 See Noiriel 1996: 57.

43 Noiriel 1991: 166-9.

44 See Dallier 1914: 32-3; Noiriel 1996: 66-8.

45 Dallier 1914: 43; Noiriel 1996: 60.

46 Dallier 1914: 56-61; the quotation is from p. 58; see also Noiriel 1996: 60-1.
For more on the carnet des nomades, see Kaluszynski 2000.

47 And not, as Bergmann and Korth suggest (1990: 5), in the First World War.

48 "Verordnung, betreffend die PaBpflichtigkeit der aus RuBland kom-
menden Reisenden," 2 February 1879, in Reichsgeselzblall 1879: 9.

181

NOTES (PAGES 109-114)

49 "Verordnung, betreffend die PaBpflichtigkeit der aus RuBland kom-
menden Reisenden," 14June 1879, Reichsgesetzblatt 1879: 155.

50 "Verordnung, betreffend die PaBpflichtigkeit der aus RuBland kom-
menden Reisenden," 29 December 1880, Reichsgesetzblatt 1881: 1.

51 "Verordnung, betreffend die PaBpflichtigkeit der aus RuBland kom-
menden Reisenden," 30 June 1894, Reichsgesetzblatt 1894: 501.

52 On the debate over the "Polonization" of the German east as a result of labor
importation, see Herbert 1990: 9-37. The quotation is from pp. 12-13.

53 See Brubaker 1992: 133.

54 Weber 1988b: 456.

55 See Weber 1988a: 504.

56 Knoke 1911: 78; quoted in Herbert 1990: 32.

57 See Herbert 1990: 34-44; the quotation is from p. 43.

58 On the anomalous stringency of passport requirements for entry into
Russia during this period, see Bertelsmann 1914, "Einleitung"; Brunialti
1915: 679.

59 Preussische Verordnung of 1 December 1892, quoted in Bertelsmann 1914:
20-1.

60 Bertelsmann 1914: 18-19.

61 See Lucassen 1997: 2.

62 Plender 1988: 90 n. 132; see also Burguiere & Revel 1989: 67.

63 Noiriel 1996: 61, 273-4.

64 Zolberg (1997: 312-13) notes that in England before 1905, "'immigrant'
rapidly became synonymous with Jew, a group so undesirable that they were
compared unfavorably with the despised Irish and . . . categorized [in the
popular mind] as close to the Chinese."

65 4 & 5 Geo. 5, c. 12, 5 August 1914, ThePublic and General Acts, 1914: 26-8. In
a pattern that would recur in British history after the Second World War,
the nearly simultaneous British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914 (7
August 1914, 4 & 5 Geo. 5 c. 17), further described as an "Act to consoli-
date and amend the Enactments relating to British Nationality and the
Status of Aliens," was motivated by the need to determine who exactly was
an alien for purposes of alien restriction.

66 "Verordnung, betreffend die vorubergehende Einfuhrung der PaBpflicht,"
31 July 1914, Reichsgesetzblatt 1914: 264-5.

67 "Verordnung, betreffend anderweite Regelung der PaBpflicht," 16
December 1914, Reichsgesetzblatt 1914: 521-2.

68 "Verordnung, betreffend anderweite Regelung der PaBpflicht," 21 June
1916, Reichsgesetzblatt 1916: 599-601.

69 "Bekanntmachung, betreffend Ausfuhrungsvorschriften zu der
PaBverordnung," 24 June 1916, Reichsgesetzblatt 1916: 601-9.

70 "R. decreto del 6 agosto 1914, n. 803, che sospende la facolta di emigrare ai
militari del R. esercito e della R. Marina," Raccolta Ufficiale, 1914, vol. 3
(Rome: Stamperia Reale): 2804—5.

71 "R. decreto 2 maggio 1915, n. 635, concernente l'espatrio per ragioni di
lavoro," Raccolta Ufficiale, 1915, vol. 2 (Rome: Stamperia Reale): 1723-7.

182

NOTES (PAGES 115-117)

According to the "Decreto Luogotenenziale 23 dicembre 1915, n. 1825,
che proroga sino alia fine della guerra il termine di validita stabilito
nell'art. 12 del R. decreto 2 maggio 1915, n. 635, circa l'espatrio per ragioni
di lavoro," (Raccolta Ufficiale, 1915, vol. 5 [Rome: Stamperia Reale]:
4623-4), the requirement that those going abroad to work present a labor
contract before doing so was to be abolished with the end of the war.

72 "Decreto-legge del 2 maggio 1915 [n. 634], concernente il soggiorno degli
stranieri in Italia," Raccolta Ufficiale, 1915, vol. 2 (Rome: Stamperia Reale):
1708-22.

73 "Decreto Luogotenenziale 16 marzo 1916, n. 339, che sospende tempo-
raneamente il rilascio dei passaporti per l'estero," Raccolta Ufficiale, 1916,
vol. 1 (Rome: Stamperia Reale): 643-4.

74 "Decreto Luogotenenziale 23 luglio 1916, n. 895, che approva le norme
relative all'entrata e all'uscita di persone dal Regno," Raccolta Ufficiale,
1916, vol. 2 (Rome: Stamperia Reale): 1896-1918.

75 "Decreto Luogotenenziale 27 agosto 1916, riguardante la concessione dei
passaporti per l'interno," Raccolta Ufficiale, 1916, vol. 3 (Rome: Stamperia
Reale): 2369-71.

76 On the characteristics of the army fielded by Italy in the First World War,
see Clark 1984: 186-8.

77 "Verordnung, uber die Abanderung der Verordnung vom 21. Juni
1916, betreffend anderweite Regelung der PaBpflicht," 10 June 1919,
Rekhsgesetzblatt 1919: 516-17. Three weeks earlier, the German government
had announced stiffened penalties for transgression of the passport
laws and for various violations of proper procedure with respect to border
controls. See "Verordnung, betreffend Strafbestimmungen fur Zuwider-
handlungen gegen die PaBvorschriften," 21 May 1919, Rekhsgesetzblatt
1919:470-1.

78 Aliens Order 1920, 25 March 1920, The Statutory Rules and Orders and Statutory
Instruments Revised to 31 December 1948, vol. II (London: His Majesty's
Stationery Office, 1950): 1-48.

79 "Decreto-legge Luogotenenziale 18 maggio 1919, n. 1093, che stabilisce
l'obbligo del passaporto per i cittadini che sono considerati o si presumono
emigranti, fissando altresi norme per il suo rilascio e le penalita da
infliggersi ai contrawentori," Raccolta Ufficiale, 1919 vol. 3 (Rome:
Tipografia delle Mantellate, 1919): 2381-4.

80 International Labour Office 1928: 85.

81 Dowry 1987: 83.

82 Executive Order No. 2285, 15 December 1915.

83 See Chan 1990: 63; Higham 1988: 203-4; the text of the law can be found at
39 Stat. 874 (1917). For some of the legal complications of American racial
classifications during this period, see Haney-Lopez (1996).

84 US Statutes at Large, vol. 40, Part I: 559; Executive Order No. 2932, 8 August
1918.

85 Public Law #79, "An Act To regulate further the entry of aliens into the
United States," 10 November 1919, US Statutes at Large, vol. 41, Part I: 353.

183

NOTES (PAGES 118-123)

86 The quotation is from Commissioner General of Immigration Anthony
Caminetti in United States, Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration
1919: 67-8. As a member of the US House of Representatives from the state
of California in the late nineteenth century, Caminetti had been active in
efforts to deport Chinese criminals. See Coolidge 1969: 230.

87 See Paxton 1975: 95.

88 Letter of F. W. Berkshire, Supervising Inspector, Mexican Border District,
El Paso, Texas, to Commissioner-General of Immigration, 5 February 1918,
US Department of Labor, Immigration Service File No. 54261/276.

89 See United States, Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration, 1918:
321.

90 For more about the role of the INS and the Border Patrol in ensuring labor
supply to agricultural businesses in the Southwest, see Calavita 1992. I am
also grateful to Professor Calavita for a personal communication (12 August
1998) clarifying my understanding of the origins of the Border Patrol.

91 The relevant history is detailed in Higham 1988, Chapter 11. Canadians
and Latin Americans were exempted from the quota limitations.

92 United States, Department of Labor, Immigration and Naturalization
Service 1934: 2.

93 Zolberg 1997: 308-9; see also Fitzgerald 1996: 132; Higham 1988: 324. For
details on the workings of the system, see United States, Department of
Labor, Immigration and Naturalization Service 1934: 2ff.

94 See Noiriel 1996, Chapter 2.

95 On the notion of the twentieth-century "protectionist state," see Strikwerda
1997.

96 On the concept of "infrastructural power" and its importance for under-
standing the novelty of European states since the nineteenth century, see
Mann 1993:59-61.

97 For a discussion of the role of the welfare state and its beneficiaries in the
labor movement in promoting immigration restriction during this period,
see Lucassen 1998.

98 This is a central theme of Mann 1993; for the case of France, see Noiriel &
Offerle 1997. My argument here parallels that of Zolberg (1997: 293, 304),
who argues that the "internalist" analyses of immigration restriction adduced
by American liberals such as John Higham are unable to explain the global
character of the restrictionist impulse in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth century, and that explanations invoking the antipathies of labor
movements to immigrant competitors ignore the fact that labor movements
generally lacked the power to compel legislative action in their interest.

5 FROM NATIONAL TO POSTNATIONAL?

1 See Reale 1930: 1-2.

2 Arendt 1973: 277.

3 See Skran 1995.

184

NOTES (PAGES 124-132)

4 Zolberg 1978: 267.

5 See Kulischer 1948: 56. Estimates of total population movements across
borders during this period range up toward 10 000 000.

6 Skran 1995: 36, 102.

7 "R. Decreto 18 marzo 1923, n. 590, relativo al rilascio dei passaporti per
l'estero agli inscritti di leva ed ai militari in congedo," Raccolta Ufficiale,
1919, vol. 3 (Rome: Tipografia delle Mantellate, 1923): 1915-1917. On the
creation of the Fascist Militia, see Clark 1984: 222.

8 Remarks in the Camera dei Deputati, 31 March 1927, quoted in Oblath
1931: 808.

9 See Levi 1947. In addition, of course, Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks
emerged from the Fascist context, but Gramsci was imprisoned rather than
merely sent into internal exile in the South, a penalty the Fascist regime
apparently considered punishment enough for a cultivated Turinese doc-
tor - but not for a southern Italian revolutionary.

10 See Skran 1995: 55-6; Zolberg 1978: 272.

1 1 On the millet system, see Kymlicka 1995: 156-8.

12 See Skran 1995: 41-5.

13 Arendt 1973: 274-5. Macartney's comments on the results of the Versailles
are trenchant: "The result of the Peace settlement was that every State in
the belt of mixed population . . . now looked upon itself as a national state.
But the facts were against them . . . Not one of these states was in fact uni-
national, just as there was not, on the other hand, one nation all of whose
members lived in a single state." Quoted in ibid. 274, n. 14.

14 See Marrus 1985: 92-4.

15 See Skran 1995: 104-5.

16 Arendt 1973: 282, n. 33.

17 Marrus 1985: 94; Skran 1995: 105.

18 See Marrus 1985: 94; Skran 1995: 106-8. Notably absent from among the
signatories were the United States, Great Britain, and Italy; the latter, of
course, had fallen under fascist control since the signing of the first
Arrangement.

19 See Skran 1995: 108-9, 113.

20 Marrus 1985: 95.

21 Skran 1995: 105.

22 Hobsbawm 1990: 132.

23 Polanyi 1944: 202.

24 Matthews 1993: 5.

25 Fitzpatrick 1994: 92.

26 Shelley 1996: xv.

27 See Hall 1992: 877-8; Kulischer 1948: 18.

28 See Turack 1972: 9.

29 I borrow the terms, and the idea of their juxtaposition by the Nazis, from
Herf 1984.

30 See Aly & Roth 1984: 55, 58-9. Despite its shortcomings, this book is by far
the best monographic treatment of the complex administrative difficulties

185

NOTES (PAGES 132-137)

the Germans confronted in the project of "solving" the Jewish "problem,"
and of how they went about tackling those obstacles. I rely on it heavily in
the present discussion.

31 "Gesetz iiber den Widerruf von Einburgerungen und die Aberkennung
der deutschen Staatsangehorigkeit," 14July 1933, Reichsgesetzblatt 1933, Part
I: 430ff.; the implementing order of 26 July 1933, is to be found at
Reichsgesetzblatt 1933, Part I: 538ff. Brief versions of the essentials of the law
and the implementing order may be found in Walk 1981: 36, 42; see also
Bergmann & Korth 1985: 27. For a brief discussion of the law and its signif-
icance, see Schleunes 1970: 110-11.

32 See Schmid et al. 1983, vol. 1: 97-100.

33 Aly & Roth 1984: 44-5. 1 have been unable to establish whether the similar-
ities between the Nazis' "work-book" and the Soviet internal passport was
coincidental or the result of conscious imitation. On the "passportization"
of the USSR in the early 1930s, see Garcelon 2000; Torpey 1997.

34 See Ayass 1988: 219-21; Treuberg 1990: 89-90.

35 "Gesetz fiber das Pafl-, das Auslanderpolizei-, und das Meldewesen sowie
uber das Ausweiswesen," 11 May 1937, Reichsgesetzblatt 1937, Part I: 589. An
analogous order was adopted for Austria soon after the Anschluss; see
"Verordnung uber die Einfuhrung des Gesetzes uber das Pali-,
Auslanderpolizei- und das Meldewesen sowie uber das Ausweiswesen vom
11. Mai 1937 im Lande Oesterreich vom 10. Mai 1938," Reichsgesetzblatt
1938, Part I: 51 1. That the Interior Minister assumed these powers over the
issuance of passports had nothing to do with the uniquely horrifying fea-
tures of the Nazi regime. Rather, in a departure from practice elsewhere in
Europe and in the United States, where passport matters are the province
of the foreign minister, in Germany these responsibilities have always been
in the domain of the Ministry of the Interior, and remain so to this day.

36 See Schulze 1942 for the main components of the original regulations and
their subsequent revisions. See also Aly & Roth 1984: 39-40.

37 Schulze 1942: 3; see Aly & Roth 1984: 141-2.

38 F. Burgdorfer, "Die Juden in Deutschland und in der Welt: Ein statistischer
Beitrag zur biologischen, beruflichen und sozialen Struktur des Judentums
in Deutschland," Forschungen zur Judenfrage Bd. 3, Hamburg 1938: 162-3,
quoted in Aly & Roth 1984: 62-3.

39 Quoted in Aly & Roth 1984: 41-2.

40 "Kennkartenzwang (3. Bekanntmachung vom 23. 7. 1938)," quoted in ibid.
75-6,78.

41 Aly & Roth 1984:53-4.

42 "Auslanderpolizeiverordnung," 22 August 1938, Reichsgesetzblatt 1938, Part
I: 1053-6.

43 See Schleunes 1970: 229-30.

44 This account is based on Skran 1995: 211-14; see also Yahil 1990: 94-5.

45 "Verordnung iiber Reisepasse von Juden," 5 October 1938, Reichsgesetzblatt
1938. 1342; Burleigh & Wippermann 1991: 87; Yahil 1990: 108-9.

46 See Wyman 1968,1984.

186

NOTES (PAGES 137-146)

47 Rubinstein 1997: 17. My italics.

48 This paragraph and the next are based on Skran 1995: 75-6, 113-14,
196-98.

49 Rubinstein 1997: 36-7. Needless to say, Rubinstein does not share Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen's view that the Jews in Germany were surrounded by
bloodthirsty "eliminationist" anti-Semites, from whom presumably Jews
would not have waited so long to flee. Nor do I.

50 Aly & Roth 1984: 75.

51 See ibid. 44-6.

52 Ibid. 25-6, 78-9.

53 Quoted in ibid. 51.

54 "Vorschriften uber das Meldewesen," 6 September 1939, Reichsgesetzblatt
1939, Part I: 1688, also in Schulze 1942: 71-8; the quotation is from the
preamble in ibid. 71.

55 The letter is quoted in Aly & Roth 1984: 42-3.

56 See Browning 1986. The quotations are from pp. 501 and 512.

57 Friedman 1955: 50.

58 See ibid, and the discussion in Schwan 1997: 116-18.

59 On the "modernity" of the Holocaust, see Bauman 1991.

60 Quoted in Aly & Roth 1984: 52-3.

61 See ibid. 66-7.

62 Kipphardt 1983: 114.

63 This paragraph is based on Zolberg et al. 1989: 21-2.

64 See Marrus 1985: 310, 317-24.

65 See Zolberg et al. 1989: 22-6.

66 See articles 27 and 28 of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of
Refugees. I clarified my understanding of the UNHCR's role in supplying
travel documents to refugees in a telephone interview with Legal
Counselor Jane Kochman of UNHCR, Washington, DC, 11 February 1999,
and on the basis of an advisory on 'Travel Documents" issued by that office,
dated 29 April 1998.

67 See Plender 1988: 206, 274, 288.

68 Turack 1972: 53.

69 Ibid. 68-9.

70 See the "Begriindung" of the Gesetzentwurf der Bundesregierung, Entwurf
eines PaBgesetzes, Deutscher Bundestag, 10. Wahlperiode, Drucksache
10/3303, 7. Mai 1985.

71 The Legal Committee's report of September 23, 1953, can be found in
Council of Europe, Consultative Assembly, Fifth Session, Third Part, 15-26
September 1953, Documents, Doc. 201, quoted in Turack 1972: 70.

72 See "Erste Beratung des Entwurfs eines Gesetzes uber das PaBwesen,"
Verhandlungen des deutschen Bundestages [hereafter Verhandlungeri] , 164.
Sitzung, Mittwoch, den 26. September 1951: 6650-1, and the "Zweite und
dritte Beratung des Entwurfs eines Gesetzes uber das PaBwesen,"
Verhandlungen, 176. Sitzung, Donnerstag, den 22. November 1951: 7223-35.
The quotation is from p. 6650.

187

NOTES (PAGES 147-152)

73 See the government's "Begriindung" of the "Entwurf eines Bundesgesetzes
uber das PaBwesen," Anlagen zu den Verhandlungen des deutschen Bundestages
[hereafter Anlagen] (1951), Drucksache 2509: 6.

74 See the "Anderungsvorschlage des Bundesrates zum Entwurf eines
Bundesgesetzes uber das PaBwesen," Anlagen (1951), Drucksache 2509: 8;
remarks of Deputy Hoppe, rapporteur of the AusschuB fur Angelegenheiten
der inneren Verwaltung, "Zweite und dritte Beratung des Entwurfs eines
Gesetzes uber das PaBwesen," Verhandlungen, 176. Sitzung, Donnerstag, den
22. November 1951: 7224; and the final version of the law, "Gesetz uber das
PaBwesen," 4 March 1952, Bundesgesetzblatt 1952, Part I: 290-2. A report of
the Industrie- und Handelstag from this period notes that the organization
was successful in achieving its aim of avoiding any exit visa requirement for
trips abroad by Germans. See Deutscher Industrie- und Handelstag
(DIHT), Tatigkeitsbericht fur das Geschaftsjahr 1951/52 (n.p., n.d.): 39. I was
unable to learn the reasons determining the DIHT's stance in these mat-
ters because, according to Dr Jurgen Mollering, the director of the Legal
Department of the organization, no materials from that year survive in the
DIHT's archives. Personal communication from Dr Mollering, 19 January
1996.

75 See the remarks of KPD deputy Paul and SPD deputy Maier in "Zweite und
dritte Beratung des Entwurfs eines Gesetzes uber das PaBwesen,"
Verhandlungen, 176. Sitzung, Donnerstag, den 22- November 1951: 7225-6,
7232, and passim.

76 US Statutes at Large, vol. 64, part I: 993.

77 See Maier's remarks, as well as the similar criticisms of FPD deputy
Neumayer, in "Zweite und dritte Beratung des Entwurfs eines Gesetzes
uber das PaBwesen," Verhandlungen, 176. Sitzung, Donnerstag, den 22.
November 1 95 1 : 7230 and 7233.

78 Verhandlungen, 164. Sitzung, Mittwoch, den 26. September 1951: 6650. The
Social Democratic representative Dr Mommer seconded the Interior
Minister's views on this matter. See "Zweite und dritte Beratung," p. 7227.

79 See Chapter 4 above.

80 Plender 1988: 22, 24; the quotation is from Turack 1972: 118.

81 Turack 1972: 61, 118-19.

82 Ibid. 119; Plender 1988: 25, 83; Saggar 1992: 48.

83 "Verordnung zum Reichsburgergesetz," November 25, 1941, Reichsgesetz-
blatt 1941, Part I: 722ff., cited in Bergmann & Korth 1990: 27.

84 The preceding paragraphs are based on Plender 1988: 135-6; Turack 1972:
120-1.

85 On the Immigration Act of 1971, see Miles & Phizacklea 1984: 69-73.

86 For the report on the proposed law by the joint committee of the
Committees on Presidential Affairs, Internal Affairs, and Foreign Affairs,
see Senato della Repubblica, IV Legislatura, "Relazione e testo degli articoli
approvati dalle Commissioni Riunite: la (Affari della Presidenza del
Consiglio e dell'Interno) e 3a (Affari Esteri) (Relatore Battino Vittorelli),"
N. 1 775-A, sul Disegno di Legge presentato dal Ministro degli Affari Esteri

188

NOTES (PAGES 152-161)

di concerto col Ministro dell'Interno, di Grazia e Giustizia, ecc, nella
Seduta del 13 Luglio 1966, communicata alia Presidenza il 24 luglio 1967.

87 Article 8 of the Convention for European Economic Co-operation, the con-
stitutional instrument of the OEEC, quoted in Turack 1972: 53.

88 See "Erste Beratung des von der Bundesregierung eingebrachten Entwurfs
eines Passgesetzes," Deutscher Bundestag, 10. Wahlperiode, 149. Sitzung,
den 27. Juni 1985, and "Zweite und dritte Beratung des Passgesetzes,"
Deutscher Bundestag, 10. Wahlperiode, 202. Sitzung, den 28. Februar
1986, as well as the Greens' various proposed revisions to the law.

89 Bergmann & Korth 1990: 6-7.

90 Plender 1988: 214.

91 Turack 1972: 115.

92 See Sassen 1996.

93 On these points, see Cornelius et al. 1994.

94 Richmond 1994: 216.

95 See "Centri speciali prima dell'espulsione," Corriere delta Sera, 20 February
1998: 3.

96 I am grateful to Susan Sterett for pointing this out to me.

97 "The Convention on International Civil Aviation, Annexes 1 to 18" (n.p.:
International Civil Aviation Organization, 1991); see also "Memorandum
on ICAO: The Story of the International Civil Aviation Organization"
(Montreal: ICAO, 1994); "Machine Readable Travel Documents, Part I:
Machine Readable Passports," 3rd edn. (Montreal: International Civil
Aviation Organization, 1992).

98 Brubaker 1994: 230.

99 For an analysis of the effectiveness of controls on migration, see Zolberg
forthcoming.

100 This is the main thrust of Soysal 1994.

101 Seejacobson 1997.

102 Soysal 1994: 159.

103 Arendt 1973: 230.

104 On these issues, see Marshall 1964.

105 Walzer 1983: 39.

106 See Caldeira 1996.

107 Blakely & Snyder 1997: 7.

CONCLUSION

1 Meyer 1987: 52.

2 Bertelsmann 1914: 13-17.

3 See Hannum 1987.

4 See Turack 1972: 8-9. The case in question was Satwant Singh Sawhney v.
Assistant Passport Officer, Government of India, 10 April 1967. Ironically, the
result of this decision was the Passport Act 1967, which enumerated the
specific grounds on which the Indian government could refuse a passport

189

NOTES (PAGES 161-166)

to an applicant. The 1967 Act was the first statutory regulation of a matter
that theretofore had been left arbitrary.

5 Bergmann & Korth, 1990: 4.

6 Plender 1988: 150.

7 Dowty 1987: 171.

8 Ibid. 128.

9 See Bhagwati 1976.

10 Zolberg 1978: 271.

1 1 For a thoughtful discussion of the reasons why a liberal polity might want to
restrict entry into its territory, see Whelan 1988.

12 Already in 1959 - that is, before the arrival in Europe of large numbers
of "guestworkers" who have been seen as the vanguard of a reconfiguration
of the relationship between citizenship and access to rights (see Soysal
1994) - a leading analyst of the role of nationality in international law put
it this way: "Admission, especially of persons who wish to take up residence
in the admitting State, resembles in many respects naturalization (which
sometimes results): the foreign national is thus admitted to the local legal
community; through his residence or actual sojourn [J rights and obliga-
tions come into being which resemble those resulting from nationality."
(Van Panhuys 1959: 55).

13 Goodwin-Gill 1978: 26.

14 Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states flatly,
"Everyone has the right to a nationality" (UN Department of Public
Information 1985). The Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless
Persons was adopted in 1954, and the Convention on the Reduction of
Statelessness in 1961. The quotation is from Dowty 1987: 109.

15 I am grateful to David Laitin for insisting on this point in a personal com-
munication.

16 See Garcelon 2000; Fitzpatrick 1994; Matthews 1993; Torpey 1997;
Zaslavsky & Luryi 1979.

17 Fussell 1980: 24.

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202

INDEX

airline companies 10
Alien Act, US 94

Aliens Restriction Act, UK 68, 70, 91,
112

Anatolian Greek refugees 126
apartheid-era South Africa, granting

of passports 9, 162
Armenian refugees 126
Nansen passport 128
artisans, movement of, Prussia 61-2
Assyrians, Nansen passports 129
Austria, Anschluss 135, 136
Austrian refugees 138
authoritarian states, control on

movement 9
aveu 23, 24, 33

Balkan refugees 126
Bavaria, citizenship 72
beggars 58, 89, 133
Belgium, relaxation of passport

controls 145
Bertillon, Alphonse 107
birth certificate 107
birth registers 21, 43
Bismarck, Otto von 82, 88, 90, 109
Bolshevik regime 124-5, 130
boundaries 1, 9, 154-5
brigands 32, 33, 37, 46, 49
British Nationality Act (1948) 149
British Overseas Citizens 151
British Protected Persons 151
British Subjects (without citizenship)

151

British Visitor's Card 149
Brubaker, Rogers 14, 64, 65, 72, 73,
156

Burlingame Treaty (1868) 96, 97

cahiers de doleances 22-3
carte de surete 50
censuses 11, 12, 14, 30, 34

German Jews 132, 139-40
certificates of residence 21, 31-2, 44
certificate de civisme 45, 47, 49-50
China-United States treaties 96-7
Chinese

emigration rights to United States 96
restriction/exclusion controls,

United States 97-101
Chinese Exclusion Acts, US 97-9, 101
citizenship laws
Commonwealth countries 149
early twentieth-century Germany

114
France 106
Italy 105

nineteenth-century Germany 71-5,
91

United States 95-6

citizenship rights 156
and international passports 161-2
and Nansen passports 128, 129

civil identity 107

civil status, French citizens 43-4, 56
Cold War 144, 146

Commonwealth citizens, immigration

controls 149-50
Commonwealth Immigration Act

(UK) 149-50
Communist China 9
communists
and West German passport controls

146-7, 148
denial of passports, United States

148, 162
Condorcet31, 53

203

INDEX

Congress of Vienna (1815) 57, 62, 72
conscription 14

Council of Europe, Legal Committee

145-6, 148
Czechoslovakian refugees 138

Declaration of the Rights of Man and

Citizen 25, 28, 55
Delacroix, Jean-Francois 35, 39, 40
"direct rule" 14, 15
documentary controls on

movement
Europe 18-19

nineteenth-century Germany

58-66, 71-92
revolutionary France 21-56
United Kingdom 66-71
driver's license 166

East Germans, and FRG passport

controls 147
Eichmann, Adolf 135, 142-3
"embracing" societies, states as 11-12
emigration policy
Italy 103-4, 116-17, 152
United Kingdom 68-9
emigration restrictions, German

Confederation 58, 59, 64-6, 75, 77
emigres, treatment of, France 27, 29,

30, 32, 44, 49
England see United Kingdom
entry visas 163
Estates General 22, 23
Europe
passport controls 18-20
postwar, loosening of passport
controls 143-57
European Economic Community
elimination of controls on

movement 152-3, 154
loosening of internal borders 154-5
Schengen Accords (1985) 153, 154,
155

European passport

creation of 145

FRG support for 153
European Union 158

concerns over outer boundary
vulnerability 154-5

need for national ID card 155
exit visas 162

external passports 158, 159
France 49

see also international passports

Fascists, Italy, emigration policy 125
Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)
adopts unfalsifiable passports 153
and treatment of communists 146,
147-8

Greens' concerns over "data

protection" 153
identity cards 166
passport law 146, 147, 153-4, 161
support for European passport 153
feudalism
abolition of 57, 66-7
to capitalism transformation 8
Filipinos, access to passports, US 102
First World War, passport controls

111-16, 121
foreigners
labour recruitment, Germany 78-9
legal concept of 20, 28
passport needs

Germany 58, 83, 91
Great Britain 52, 69-70, 91
Prussia 60, 61, 62
revolutionary France 27, 30, 37

40, 42-3, 47, 50, 52-4, 55
United States 117-18, 120
registration systems 1 1
Foucault, Michel 5, 11, 16
France

arrest of persons leaving the

Kingdom 25
border controls 26-7
certificates of residence 31-2
citizenship 106

Constituent Assembly 26-7, 51, 55
Constitution of 1791 29
Convention 44-51
Council of Ancients 52
criticisms over restraint of

movement 24-5, 42-3
departmentalization 28-9
distinction between natives and

foreigners 50, 56, 106, 107
documentary requirements,

eighteenth century 21-2
emigres, treatment of 27, 29, 30, 32,

44,49

204

INDEX

First Directory 51-6
foreigners

discriminatory taxation of 106-7

identification documents for

105-8
identity cards 166
immigrant workers 107, 112
invasion fears 26, 30
Legislative Assembly 30, 32, 33,

36-44
military service 106
National Assembly 24, 25, 26, 27,

29, 30
"nomads" 108

passport controls 21-56, 92, 112
separation of nationals and non-
nationals 106
watch committees 46, 47, 48
see also French Revolution
Frederick William I of Prussia 58
Frederick William III of Prussia 59
foreigners passport laws 59-60, 61,
62

movement of "friendly" states'

artisans 61-2
Prussian subjects passport

exemption 60-1
free trade, interwar period 129, 130
French citizens
civil status 43-4, 56
legal concept 20, 28
passport requirements 42-3, 52, 54
regulation of 27, 50-1
French Revolution 21-56
direct rule 14
documentary controls on

movement 2, 3
flight of the King 25-6, 29, 38
foreigners

carte de surete 50

definition 30-1

distinction from natives 50

passport needs 27, 30, 37, 40,
42-3, 47, 50, 52-4, 55

surveillance of 31, 50
freedom of movement 23-4, 29, 43

under the Convention 44-51
passport controls

elimination impact 29-32

First Directory concerns 51-6

post-Revolution 49-51

pre-Revolution 21-5

proposed law 34, 36-44
reasons for 55-6
reintroduction debate of early

1792 32-6
renewal 25-9

under the Convention 44-9

gated communities 157
German Confederation 62, 64
abolition of passport controls 58
citizenship 71-5, 91
constituent states' exclusion of

undesirables 89
controls and military obligations 75
documentary restrictions on

movement of lower orders 58
emigration laws 58, 59, 64-5, 75,

77, 79

foreign workers need to carry

identification cards 110
foreigners' need for passports 58,

83,91

freedom of movement 65, 71-5,
78-9

freedom of settlement 65, 73, 74, 89
industrialists demand for foreign

labour 78-9
itinerant poor, special restrictions

80-1

liberation of peasants, early

nineteenth century 59
"Pass-Card Treaty" among German

states 76
Passport Bill, Reichstag debate 82,

85-8, 91
passport controls, relaxation of

75-81

Passport Law (1867), broader

significance 88-92
Passport Treaty (1865) 80-1, 82, 83,

86

subjects' freedom to practice any

trade 89
see also North German
Confederation; Prussia
German Democratic Republic

(GDR), passport laws 146, 147
German imperial government
expulsion of Polish workers 109
foreigners and passport controls
110-11

205

INDEX

passport controls

Great War 112-14

post-Great War 116
passport requirements for those

coming from Russia 108-9, 110
visa requirements 113
German Jews
difficulties in obtaining refuge

outside German-controlled

Europe 137, 138-9
failure to seek refuge 139
passports stamped with red "J" 136,

137

seek to leave German-controlled

Europe 137
special census of 132, 139-40
German National Socialists see Nazis
German passports, issuance

guidelines 113-14
German Second Empire 90-1

unification of passport laws 84
Germany, Federal Republic see

Federal Republic of Germany
Giddens, Anthony 15
Goffman, Erving 15
governmental! ty 5
Great Depression 129-30
Great War
passport controls 111-16, 121

France 92, 112

Germany 112-14

Great Britain 112

Italy 105

United States 117
Greer, Donald 23, 27, 54
gypsies 18

Habermas.Jurgen 10

High Commissioner for Refugees

from Germany 138
Hobsbawm, E.J. 130
household registration systems 14

identification

anthropometric, France 107, 108

importance of 16

methods 17

state-sponsored 16-17
identity 13, 15

possession of 4

through social standing 17

identity cards 7, 12, 50, 63, 64, 110,
121, 153, 155, 158, 167

purpose of 165-6
identity papers

as currency 10

as invasions of small-scale social life
14-15

immigrant workers, France 107, 112
immigrants, 'identity' of 13
Immigration Act (1891, US) 101
Immigration Act (1924, US) 120
Immigration Act (1971, UK) 151
immigration controls 156

Commonwealth citizens 149-50
immigration policies

states' role 6

United States 101-2, 117, 131

see also emigration policies
India, passports and citizen rights 161
institutionalization

of immigration control, US 101

of nation-states 13, 14-17
Intergovernmental Committee on

Refugees 136
internal migration, Prussia 73-4
internal passports 158, 159, 164-5

France 49

Italy 1 15

Nazi Germany 133
purpose of 165
Soviet Union 130-1, 165
International Civil Aviation

Organization 155-6
international human rights 156, 159
international migration, post-First

World War 122-3
international passports 158, 159-60,
164

and citizenship 161-2
departure 160-2

entry to destination country 162-3
return 163-4
international refugee law, and

Nansen passports 129
International Refugee Organization
144

international refugee regime, early

inter war period 123, 124-31
international visa system 53
inter war period
Nazi Germany and persecution of
Jews 131-43

206

INDEX

protectionism 129-30
refugee regime 123, 124-9
Italy

citizenship laws 105

emigration encouraged 103, 104-5,

116-17, 152
Fascist, emigration policy 125
passport controls

Great War 114-16

post-Great War 116-17
passport law

(1901) 103-5

(1967) revision 151-2
perceived as weak link in Schengen

Accord 155
visa requirements 115

Japanese laborers, United States 102
Jewish refugees 137, 138, 139
Jews

deported to death camps 141
Nazi persecution of 131-43
wear Yellow Badge 141-2
see also German Jews

Kenyan Asians, and British nationality
150-1

League of Nations 123, 127
and new passport regime 127
create High Commissioner for
Refugees from Germany 138
Evian Convention on refugee

problem 135-6
Nansen passport 127-9, 138
Lemontey 36-7

Lefebvre, George 23, 26, 47, 49
Liebknecht, Wilhelm 85, 87-8, 91
Louis XVI

execution 45

flight of 25-6, 29, 38
Lublin Reservation resettlement of
Jews 140

Luxembourg, relaxation of passport
controls 145

McDonald, James G. 138
Madagascar Plan 140, 141
Malcolm, Neill 138
Mann, Michael 11, 12
Marrus, Michael 129

Marx, Karl 4, 167

medical inspection, and exclusion

102, 103
merchants, France 27, 32, 44
Mexican alien infiltration, US 118-19
Mexico 118-19

"coyotes" 66
Meyer, John 5
migration

and migration policies 5-6

in terwar period 124-31

see also emigration; immigration
controls

military service 19, 106, 113, 115-16
Minority Treaties 126-7
Mussolini, Benito 125

Nansen passport 127-9, 138
Napoleon 59,61,62
nation, concept of 14
nation-states 1 , 7, 9

as network of institutions 12-13

Germany 90, 91

institutionalization 14-17

movement within 9

regulation of defined populations
13, 159

right to control entry 159
"national" boundaries of states 9
nationality

and passports 69, 70

identification through ID cards 155

lack of, and statelessness 163
Nazis 9

approach to Jewish problem 131-2,
140-1

census of German Jews 132, 139-40
denationalization of German Jews

132, 138
deport Jews to death camps 141
extermination of European Jewry

140, 141

"final solution" to Jewish problem

140, 141, 143
Foreigners Police Order 135
identification cards for Jews 135,

136, 139-40, 142, 143
invasion of USSR 140, 141
Lublin Reservation resettlement

140

Madagascar Plan 140, 141

207

INDEX

monitoring movement of Jews

134-5, 142-3
Nuremberg laws (1935) 132, 135,

138

occupation of Poland 140-1
Order on Residential Registration
134

people's registry for all Jews 139
persecution of the Jews 131-43
personal identity documents 133-4
plans to expel Jews 135-6
racial-imperialist policy 123-4
resistance by Jews to carrying

identification papers 142
work-book system 133
Yellow Badge to be worn by all Jews

141-2

Netherlands, relaxation of passport

controls 145
new institutionalism 13
nobility, as foreign to the French

nation 28
Noiriel, Gerard 7, 13, 28, 37, 43-4
"nomads", France 108
non-patrials, UK 151
North German Confederation
absence of documentation for

lower classes 84-5, 86-7
decriminalization of travel 58, 71,

81-8
establishment 82
foreigners

expulsion of 87-8
need for passport 83
Passport Bill 82, 83-4, 85-8
Passport Law 88-92, 108, 116, 134
residency cards 82-3, 86

Ottoman Empire, refugee problem
126

Palestinian Refugees 144
parish serfdom 19, 66, 67
pass-cards, German states 76, 90
Passenger Acts, UK 67-8
passport controls

absolutist Europe 18-20

and transportation 77-8

First World War 111-16

France 21-56, 92, 112

Germany 75-92, 112-13

Great Britain 69-70, 91, 1 12
historical development 1, 2
Italy 114-65

post-First World War 116-21
post-Second World War Europe

143-57
reasons for 55-6
United States 117-18, 120, 121
passport law
Federal Republic of Germany 146,

147, 153-4, 161
Italy 103-5

North German Confederation

88-92, 108

proposal 81-8
Prussia 59-60

revolutionary France 34, 36-41,
45-6, 49, 54-5
passport regime, interwar period

124-31
passport system
creation of 9
historical development 3
passports 12, 158, 167
and nationality 69, 70
as certificate of probity 35
counterfeit 49
details 27, 34-5, 38, 40
machine-readable 155
purpose of 160, 163, 166
racial politics of, decolonizing

United Kingdom 150-1
replacements 22
requirements 34-5

circumvention of, France 22
standardization 115
see also external passports; internal
passports; international passports
patrials, UK 151
Peace of Prague (1866) 82
"penetrating" societies, states as

10-11
Poland
Jewish population 140
Jews wear Yellow Badge 141
Nazi occupation of 140-1
Polanyi, Karl 8, 20, 32, 67, 122, 130
Polish workers, east Germany 109-10
poor relief 19
and movement restrictions,
England 18-19

208

INDEX

German Confederation 89, 91

nationalization 8-9, 69

Poor Law Amendment Act, UK 69

Prussian municipalities 73, 74

revolutionary France 24

Speenhamland system 67, 69
postwar Europe, loosening of
passport controls 143-57
private entities

as "sheriffs deputies" 9-10

authorization of movement 5, 8

transfer to state control over
movement 8
protectionism, interwar period 129
Prussia

abolition of documentary
requirements 58

citizenship laws 73-5

emigration laws 66

exit passport law 63

foreigners passport laws 59-60, 61,
64

geographical changes following

Napoleon's defeat 62
Imperial Police Ordinances 18
incoming travelers issued passports

60

internal migration 73-4
movement of "friendly" states'

artisans 61-2
passport issuing authorities 62
poor relief 73, 74
surveillance

of "dangerous classes" 79-80

of foreigners 60, 63^i
Prussian subjects
documentary controls on

movement 75
exit passport laws 63
freedom of movement 60-1, 63-4
identity cards for internal travel 63,

64

no passport requirements 60-1
redefinition 73-4

quotas and immigration visas, US 120

Refugee Convention (1951) 144
refugees

early interwar period 123, 124—31
post-Second World War 143-4

problem of, from German-
controlled Europe 135, 136

travel documents 127-9
Republic of Ireland 149, 150
residency cards 83
restrictive exit policies 162
revolution indentificatoire 7
Rubinstein, William 137-8, 139, 142
Russia 9

Czarist, documentation of
movement 19

Nazi invasion of 140, 141

Soviet internal passports 130-1, 165
Russian refugees 124-5, 127

Nansen passport 127-8

Saxony, eliminates visa requirements
77

Scandinavian countries, relaxation of

passport controls 145
Schengen Accords (1985) 153, 154,

155

seamen, France 45
Second World War

Nazi persecution of Jews 140-3

refugee problem 143-4
serfdom 8, 19, 57, 66, 67, 71
servants 8, 18
shipping enterprises 10
slaves 8

Slavic people, Nazis attitude to 140
social control 23
social security card, US 166
social standing, as indicator of

identity 17
South Africa, apartheid-era, granting

of passports 9, 162
Soviet Union see Russia
Speenhamland system 67, 69
state monopolization of the

legitimate means of movement

1-2, 3, 5, 6-10, 20, 122, 156, 157,

159, 166, 167
administrative infrastructure for

7-8
France 53

through defining who belongs and

who does not 13
transfer from local to "national"

level 8-9
stateless persons 123, 124, 163

209

INDEX

travel documents 127-9, 138
states

as "embracing" societies 1 1
as "penetrating" societies 10-11
identification of inhabitants 17
relationship with subjects/ citizens
15-16

rights to control entry 159
see also nation-states
surveillance 11, 14, 15, 16-17
"dangerous classes", Prussia 79-80
foreigners

France 31, 47, 55

Prussia 60, 63-4
French citizens 42, 47
German citizens 133
German occupied territories 140
preoccupation of European police

bureaucracies 145, 146
working classes, Germany 86-7
Switzerland
eliminates visa requirements 77
objects to Jewish immigrants 136

taxation 14
Tilly, Charles 14
Tocqueville, Alexis de 55, 85, 90
toll barriers for goods 29
transportation, and passport controls
77-8

unauthorized migration 9

United Kingdom
accused of racial discrimination 151
Aliens Order (1920) 116
Aliens Restriction Act 69, 70, 91,
112

British Nationality Act (1948) 149
British Visitor's Card 149
Commonwealth Immigration Act

(1962) 149-50
dismantling of feudalism 66-7
documentary attestations 70
emigration policy 68-9
foreigners, passport requirements

52, 69-70, 91
freedom of internal movement 67
Immigration Act (1971) 151
immigration crisis, post-Second

World War 149-51
Irish immigration to 67

Kenyan Asians and British

nationality 150-1
Passenger Acts (1803) 67-8
passportless travel with Republic of

Ireland 149
passports for aliens 1 16
"patrials" and "non-patrials" 151
poor relief 18-19, 67, 69
restrictions on movement between

parishes, seventeenth century

18-19, 66
rules over uncontrolled departures,

fourteenth century 18
state-supported colonization 68
United Nations High Commissioner's

Office for Refugees (UNHCR)

144

United Nations Relief and

Rehabilitation Administration
(UNRRA) 144
United States
Alien Act (1798) 94
anti-Chinese violence 97, 100
Asian emigrant restrictions 117, 118
automated immigrant checking

system 1
Border Patrol 1 19
China treaties 96-7
Chinese

certificate requirements 98, 99
emigrants 96-7, 109
exempt categories 98-9
registratrion system 100-1
Scott Act exclusions 99-100, 102
Chinese Exclusion Acts 97-9, 101
Communists denied passports 148,
162

drivers license 166
emigrant passports 117
Filipinos treatment 102
freedom of movement 96
German emigrants 79
immigrant inspection transferred

abroad 103
immigrants, literacy test 117, 118
Immigration Act (1891) 101
Immigration Act (1924) 120
Immigration and Naturalization

Service 1, 148
immigration policy 101-2

Great War 117

210

INDEX

inter war years 131
immigration regulation 94-5

nationalization of 101-3
Italian emigrants 103, 104, 105
Japanese exclusion 102
opens door to Jewish refugees 139
passport controls

and state development 94-6

on aliens 117-18, 120
passport issuance, federal control 95
passports, purposes 160
quota system for immigrants

119-20

racial inferiority and contagious

disease 102
recruit non-white labour 96
social security card 166
transatlantic passage restrictions

94-5

vagabonds 18, 23, 51, 58, 64, 89, 133
Vagrants' Registration Book (Nazi

Germany) 133
visa requirements, German states 76,

77

visa system, international 53

visas
exit 162

machine-readable 155

Walzer, Michael 157
watch committees (French

Revolution) 46, 47, 48
Weber, Max 4, 14, 15, 109, 121, 167
West Germans, and GDR passport

controls 147
Western Europe
documentary controls on

movement 2
passport controls, First World War

11-16, 121
passport requirements 92
Woloch, Isser 21
working classes, and passports,

Germany 84-5, 86-7, 89-90
"writing on the body", as a means of

identification 17, 124
Wurttemberg government,

emigration requirements 64-5
Wyman, David 137, 139

Zolberg, Aristide 6, 94, 99, 120, 162

211